Mm... What does it mean? Revenge on a man and a priest? The children died. The pain of their deaths didn't. It's a return to pain. After the numbing episode of shock and oblivion, it's now the deeply cutting pain. The axe symbolises this deep cut for me. Cutting everything in one go. Life with the children and then, from one moment to the next: the cutting.
I feel towards Maricias loss. I don't agree with Maricias answer. She wants to atone for her pain. By taking pain as atonement. Nobody has deceived her, neither husband nor priest. She was deluding herself. And so the others have only been fooling themselves. Everybody has fooled themselves. One does not know whether the man from your story kept his wife in marriage by force or not. Whether she was locked up like a prisoner 24/7. So I would think that if she had not been what the pictures testify to, she could have gone away, could have taken her children with her. At least there were some happy time. Children with dog and trees. She did not. Maybe she didn't dare? Afraid of the uncertain consequences? So she alone with the children on the run, she alone could have been responsible for bad consequences, their deaths?
So maybe it's guilt she feels. Guilt that she didn't act when there was time. Guilt that she cuddled up in the warmth of this room, sleeping, dreaming, not paying attention. What a horror to wake up and find the children dead. It's human to want to avoid that pain. To dream the trauma away.
That man, a one-dimensional prison guard? Like he had nothing to do with the children, didn't love them? Nor his wife? Not at any time? His pain: unimportant? The torturer, he too is a tormented one. To shame or punish him: isn't this the return to total pain after all?
I feel for all of them. The children will not come back to life. Hard to learn a life without them.
How did you make the drawings? Must have taken quite some time creating them. They deliver a certain mood, very felicitous. As if they were indeed made by a kid.
Dear Erika,
I am not at all surprised by your perspective, and delighted that you have offered to share it.
Of course there is responsibility from many parties. This adds to Maricia's distress...as it does to all of us when we make decisions and others suffer.
No, the husband did not hold her prisoner, but psychologically she was held prisoner by the ideology of her Church. She made a decision to bend to that will, but having been indoctrinated since birth by an all-encompassing belief system, her free will was compromised. She believed it was a mortal sin to leave her husband. That's what the priest told her, though he knew the dangerous circumstances of her life.
Also, recall that she had a severely ill child. There were still choices, but they are harder when one of your children is an invalid.
This is the story that will be told. She was there, he was not. She provided, he did not. That was a story he did not want the world to know. Now it will be public.
Revenge...no, revenge is not in the story. Holding someone to account, publicly revealing events--this is not revenge. A public shaming is not revenge. It is the merest justice.
The pictures: I can't draw. I don't know about perspective and shading. I showed the drawings (digital using Paint and GIMP) to my son and husband before I posted and asked if I should be ashamed of them, because they are so primitive. But son and husband told me to go ahead. Parts of the pictures were created over a period of months when I was writing a memoir. Here I chopped them up and added elements to fit the story line...Maricia's shattered psyche.
The memoir was been killed (writing that was a therapeutic exercise) but the pictures mean something to me. Many of them reflect vividly recalled scenes from childhood.
Thanks so much for stopping by. You always have something interesting to say.
Your friend,
AG
(BTW: Speaking of the one-dimensional prison guard, the model for the husband: he was an indifferent, cruel, brutal person who enjoyed power. He exploited the weakness of the family with the invalid child and threatened to inflict harm, even death, should disobedience surface, should there be an attempt to escape. He even threatened to kill anyone who came to the aid of the wife and children. His violent actions in the home fully backed up his willingness to follow through on this promise. Of course, there are still choices. Always there are choices. But sometimes in life, there are prison guards, brutal bullies. Surely you have read about these in the newspapers. )
Is not the very act of public shaming also a Christian indoctrinated matter?
I think you are trying to be provocative :)
As you know, after the Killing Fields in Cambodia, survivors strove to have the truth come out. After the Armenian Genocide in Turkey, survivors strove to have the truth come out. In South Africa, at the end of apartheid, There was a Truth Commission.
Those who were responsible for these tragedies strove to suppress the truth. Can't raise the dead. Can't undo history. The only justice survivors and families can hope for is that truth comes out. If this shames some, that is their own doing, their own acts that have brought them shame.
This is not Christian. This is human
Surely you know that. 😇
Have a great day, Erika
Dear friend,
are you perfectly sure, absolutely and without any doubt, that there is a crystal clear truth? Are you beyond any doubt of the need for public shaming of a person in his entirety? Surely you have also heard that it is the deed that is to be judged, not the doer.
What about the paradox of a constraint of responsibility arising from public shaming? How can someone actively, out of his own insight and reflection, give his voice of compassion, yes, how can he even become credible when he is publicly shamed? It would be as if the crowd was shouting to the man: "Repent spontaneously now!"
Allow me to cast doubt on the image of a female figure who, if she has fallen victim to indoctrination without exception, by the very definition of indoctrination, must also have inflicted on her children the same oppression that your story attributes to her oppressors. Is oppression not also to be found in subtle actions and repeatedly dropped remarks of effective content? Does it not have different faces?
A person who recognizes the strong extent of oppression will also recognize that he has already lived it out on his own children and he will want to stop it. To the extent that the character in your story recognizes that under this indoctrination she had accepted as inevitable and true what she had previously believed - the sin of separation from her husband and similar beliefs - she would have set heaven and hell in motion to protect her children from further indoctrinations, I'm not talking about her husband's indoctrinations right now, but those indoctrinations she herself unconsciously carried out. Is my doubt that I suspect such unconscious acting out by a mother on her children to be completely dismissed?
Is your reader to be relieved of absolutely every doubt that this female figure did not recognize her own, and therefore blind spots, in her dealings with the children? But how then can she have been so strongly indoctrinated, if she herself did not use a single means to which she had been so vehemently brought up?
You see, if you write a story and you grant me no reasonable doubt, must I assume that you see the point of your story in my taking sides? My interpretation that the man seems too one-dimensional to me may have seemed a superfluous objection to you against this background of the clarity of the characters, but it was not for me.
The story has touched a sore point in me as well, which has been reopened to me by reading it. That my father ... been considered such a villain and this a long lasting pain of our identity as children with our father - a violent yet weak figure compared to my mom (which was no saint either). Right now I'm dealing with the "shadow" after C.G. Jung. I came to this through a lecture by a Harvard professor on Jean Piaget and the mention of the darkness that dwells within each of us and that makes us go from being a human being to being a monster at any given moment. ... Painful moments in my parenting towards my son, that is for sure.
I am not happy with your distraction to Cambodia and apartheid. To answer your initial question: Yes, I provoked, but you are trying to distract me? In your answers, you chose the greater reinforcement of what I think you left out in your story in the first place.
Can I be a critic to you? You won't convince me anyway to get involved into public shaming but in case, I am not aware that I am doing it, please give me a note. I also was raised by a strong christian doctrine. :)
Yours Erika
Dear Erika,
Of course it's a story. Every writer knows that writing a story is only half the job. Reading a story is the other half. I write with a certain idea in mind, but readers have different minds. They have their own histories, and I cannot (and do not wish to) control that.
It's like looking at a painting. What do I see? Probably not what the artist sees. The same with this story. You have the memory of your father, who you feel was wronged. And then there's Yung.
Cambodia and South Africa are not distractions. They are exactly to the point. But that's the way I see it. You bring to it something else.
And if we are not free to discuss this, then we are not free. An open exchange of ideas is good.
I love your ideas (even when I don't agree with them). I was reading your blog about memory as I went to sleep last night. An apt blog in this discussion. Today I had lunch with family and so put off writing a comment there. Later, you will get feedback on that most interesting post.
What I find really, really interesting is that we both had "villains" as fathers, although you do not see yours that way. I'm afraid mine was a nasty character--my mother never, ever said an unpleasant word about him. It was his actions, and his words, that created the impression of villainy.
You see how we come to this story from opposite poles and yet the same place? Isn't the human psyche fascinating?
Your good friend, who is a generation apart and yet close in so many ways,
AG