Do you long for your birth mother?

Secret Daughter, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Does anyone truly know the circumstances of their own birth?  Even if you look exactly like your parents, and  even if your DNA test confirms they are your parents, you never really know how your parents reacted to their first realization that there you were, eight or so months before you made your entrance.

I knew a woman who came from a loving and stable family, where she was the youngest, and was always spoiled and adored.  After her mother died, her much older sister informed her that actually, she’d been a ‘mistake’ and their mother had been shocked to discover her pregnancy, most unwelcome.

With some glee the sister explained that their mother had informed her that she was always to make her baby sister feel welcome, that they all would make the child feel welcome, as though she was planned and expected all along.  As the grandmother in Secret Daughter tells herself, “One’s actions must proceed the emotions one hopes to feel.”

But to have no idea who your parents are, neither mother nor father, nor what their circumstances were, that must be the hardest.  Whether you’ve been adopted by a loving family or not, questions must linger.

In Secret Daughter, Kavita gives birth to a baby girl under terrifying circumstances.  She is married, and even goes on to have a second child with her husband, but the baby girl cannot be kept at home.  Keeping the female child alive, and giving her what she can nearly kills Kavita, but she endures.  Naturally the baby girl never finds out how she came to be in an orphanage, although she eventually finds the orphanage from which she was adopted. 

I thought of this book when I met a young Indian woman in Leopold’s Café, in Mumbai.  She was apologising for her Swiss accent, although she spoke beautifully.  She told me she was in Mumbai to find her birth mother, or at least information about her.  Her quest was unsuccessful, although she seemed content and cheerful, and happy to at least acquaint herself with her mother country.

Where birth records allow, there are people finding their birth parents, and sometimes the meetings go well.  Sometimes not.

I know another woman who was surprised by an email from her eldest brother who had been given away at birth, although his parents eventually married and had many more children.  Her mother was quite unhappy that he had tracked her and her family down, and exposed the secret.  His siblings welcomed him, and the mother eventually relented, and welcomed him too.

In every case, a mother’s reason for giving up her child is painful.  Asha goes through the hell of hoping her mother is a saint, a hero, a martyr, then a cold and callous creature who simply couldn’t be bothered to keep her.

This novel tracks both Kavita’s journey and Asha’s.  They actually cross paths at one point, but naturally they have no idea, no suggestion of recognition.  Asha will never find her mother, although she learns a few details about her that only bring her more pain.  Even so, the search benefits both mother and daughter, eventually.

If you’ve lived this story, it might be therapeutic to read this novel.  If you’ve come across other novels that have helped you, please drop me a line.

Does religion frighten you?

Assassin’s Song by M.G. Vassanji

An old saying goes, ‘God invented spirituality, but Satan invented religion.’  How is it that a set of ideas that were meant to elevate can actually destroy?  It must be that when individuals create a religion, they earnestly believe that what they construct is for the betterment of their community. 

And yet over time, the idealism becomes twisted.  Going with the flow becomes staunching the flow, brutally if need be.  Submission becomes attack.  Turning the other cheek means throwing stones.  Feeding the poor means cutting back on food stamps.  The list is endless.

In Vassanji’s novel, the main character is a disenchanted Sufi.  Unlike most other young men disenchanted with their parents’ religion, Karsan is expected to follow in his father’s role, which is to be the living avatar, the God, of his followers.  He is in line to be the next Saheb of Pirbag. 

Most young people have more freedom to explore other religious philosophies, but Karsan’s inheritance is so constraining to him that he abandons his Gujerati village, family, beliefs and culture to pursue a Western lifestyle in the United States and then Canada.  He seeks freedom, although he’s not entirely sure what that means.  He questions the Godliness of his father, and is certain that he himself can never take on such a role.  He doesn’t feel pure enough, doesn’t believe enough, doesn’t control his emotions enough.  He cannot take on this absurd weight.  While studying literature at Harvard, his American friends can only joke about how back in that village, he was to have been the living God, something incomprehensible to them, and to himself.  Karsan and his friends aren’t terrified of religion, they just find it irrelevant and a bit weird.

Yet The Assassin’s Song certainly pinpoints the more terrifying aspects of religion.  Neighbors committing atrocities and murders on neighbors, countries waging war against one another, all in the name of whose religion is best.  In this novel Vassanji traces some of the history of religious bloodshed in and around India, all so appalling and ironic.

Meanwhile, back in Gujarat, are the riots where Muslims are brutally murdered.  Karsan’s father’s version of Sufiism is a path between the Hindus and Muslims. The Saheb maintains that a mystical view of oneness is the only side to take.  The non-Sufis, and even some of the Sufis, would prefer a more concrete approach, and are frustrated with his refusal to take the material world seriously.  Militant Hindus disregard his beliefs, seeing him and his community as purely Muslim, the enemy.  Finally, despite Karsan’s father trying to reason with a mob drunk on blood, red wine and bhang, or maybe because of his trying to reason at all, they attack and kill him, and then move on past the gates to the hundreds of followers he was trying to protect. 

Years after Karsan has left, he returns, sitting in the shrine’s compound at night, still hearing what must have been echoes of the murders.  Pirbag is smashed and desecrated.  Yet some followers have survived, if that word can be used.  They welcome him with hard work and garlands. 

Perhaps when his father originally named him as successor, instead of his more pious younger son, he knew exactly what he was doing.  The one who fears what religion can do is likely the one to handle it most gently. 

As far as literature therapy goes, The Assassin’s Song won’t turn you off religion.  It will just remind you to see the dangers inherent in believing in any religion without question.   It will also remind you of the true purpose of religion, which is surely to instill a sense of reverence, not just toward one’s own religious figures, but toward the creator, the creation, the self, the neighbor, and the other.  When we revere something, or someone, we have a tendency to behave mercifully.  Surely this is what's best for any community?  

Past Lives—What can you remember?

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

As a pre-schooler, I would tell my Irish Catholic mum that in my last life, I was a Jewish man who was killed in an accident where a balcony over a railway collapsed.  She nearly collapsed.  No, I was not and never had been Jewish, I was not a man and couldn’t have ever been one, and as a little Catholic girl, I was not to believe in reincarnation.  The whole thing was just wrong.

As I would insist, describing details of my winter overcoat, my baldness, the state of disrepair of the balcony, the relatives’ voices warning me off the balcony, my stubborn insistence on peering down at the railway tracks, my mother would grow truly harried.  Reincarnation did not and could not exist, and furthermore it was not allowed.  When I then went on to tell her of another death involving a Victorian hot air balloon she really popped.

Today I’m not totally convinced in the theory of reincarnation, but I do warm to the idea.  I’d rather live in a universe where we reincarnate, rather than one where we don’t.  So when the trailers came out for the movie, Cloud Atlas, I was intrigued.  It didn’t have a very long run in the theatres, so I tried to find it on pay per view, and couldn’t.  It finally appeared on our regular cable one night, so I PVR’d it.  Luckily I did, as I needed to rewind it umpteen times to understand the dialogue and quick time shifts.  Eventually I was onto my third go around with it, still stumped by certain passages.  Quickly I downloaded the book and fell into a deep and fascinating well.

These are six stories nested into one another, like Russian dolls.  They begin in the 1800s, move forward and backward among the 1930s, 1970s, 1980s, 2100s and perhaps the 3000s, although it’s hard to tell, since that narrator’s concept of numbers leaps from the hundreds suddenly to the millions.  By that time frame, civilization is mostly gone, aside from small tribal groups of nuclear survivors in Hawaii, and an even smaller group of travelling individuals who still possess technology, but their numbers have dwindled to a mere handful.  The individuals in these stories are the same throughout the time frames, although they aren’t necessarily reincarnated into the same bodies that the movie depicts.

Stylistically, the novel is challenging.  The sections from the 1800s use the vocabulary and speech patterns used then, so the language is much more elaborate and convoluted from how we speak.  But the sections from the future, especially the far future rely on very strange word changes and groupings.  Not only does the language shift over time, but the nuclear catastrophe that wipes out civilization has a huge impact on the language.  If you loved Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky”, and if you enjoyed figuring out what those slithy toves were doing gyring and gimbling in the wabe, then you’ll enjoy the linguistic puzzles in the furthest future story. 

As far as literature therapy goes, this novel does raise questions about reincarnation, but more importantly about the development of the human race.  We like to think that we’re improving with every generation and incarnation, but it will be up to you to see if the author sees improvement or decline. 

This novel also questions the concept of civilization.  Who is civilized?  What does it mean to be civilized?  Are we more or less civilized than our predecessors?  Whether you believe in reincarnation or not, whether you remember past lives or not, reflecting on your own degree of civilization will always do you good.  Read this book!  It will be good for you!

And if this book triggers any past life memories, please do drop me a line to share!

Is anarchy loosed upon your world?

The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer,

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned,

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

Find full text at   http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172062

Yeats’ poem has been turning and turning in my head since the revelations this last week that the infamous video of Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine was found.  Earlier, Toronto’s mayor has been described by his supporters as one of the most honest people you can ever find, disciplined and full of conviction. 

Since then, he made a public apology, such as it was, but also issued an announcement that he would be making an important announcement on his weekly radio program.  CTV cameras were crammed into the small studio with him and his brother Doug, and Rob Ford looked bloated, beaten and very sad, not to mention scared.  In a monotone, he mumbled apologies, insisting that apologies were absolutely all he could do at this point, and then announced the big one:  He would be hiring a driver.

He did have a driver earlier on, but that one’s since been arrested and is awaiting trial on all sorts, including extortion and drug related crimes.  Then, to resume a sense of normalcy, Mayor Ford picked up a list of community events, and proceeded to read them in a half dead voice, rubbing at his face.  The first item was for an event that would have been finishing up as he spoke, but he plowed through.  I wondered if he didn’t realize the day’s date. Several items into the list, someone in the studio must have realized the same, because he suddenly looked up, and told us the day’s date, then proceeded with the mumbled list.  Eventually it petered out and he got back to his apology.  Then he trailed off saying he had no words left.  His brother took over and announced they’d be taking a break.

They went off air at that point, and by the following Friday both had been relieved of their radio program by the station manager. 

Mayor Ford had plenty of words in the latest video to hit the news, where in a drug induced frenzy (no, that is not alcohol talking) he pummels the air and viciously demonstrates how he is going to murder someone who has troubled him.  Apparently that someone had referred to his brothers as liars, thieves and birds.  Birds? 

My mother, who would be 99 if she was still alive, used the term to denote men past their prime.  Was this the insult that would drive Ford to gouge out a man’s eyes before killing him?  From various online gangster dictionaries, I have determined that bird could mean cocaine, a young girl, or one hundred dollars.  Take your pick.  None of these alternatives fit the context of insults, but then maybe his syntax was off, along with his respiration and heart beat.

Meanwhile, Toronto’s best seem to be standing around with their hands in their pockets, afraid to make a move against a man whose behavior has been so questionable that the police have spent huge amounts of money tailing him, piling up evidence of all sorts of telephone calls to drug sellers and eerie meetings in vacant parking lots, with packages being left in Ford’s vehicle.  The Mayor is known to frequent crack houses, pal with known criminals, and vividly describe how he will stamp out someone’s life.  Apparently he can do it in ten minutes, he’s pretty sure.  A background voice suggests five is all he’d need, but no, Ford , full of passionate conviction, wants to make sure the job is done well.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed.

Is time your enemy?

Welcome to the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

Time is relentless and its repercussions unpredictable.  Time itself is not the main character in Jennifer Egan’s, Welcome to the Goon Squad, but the driving force that shapes the story.  Both a dangerous thug and a fairy god-mother, Time marches the characters along on many paths. 

Challenging to read, the plot structure is more of a web than a sloping upward line on a chart, suddenly breaking down.  Multiple characters narrate a connected viewpoint, but they don’t all know one another.  Time frames shift rapidly. 

Although we don’t meet characters who live during the Renaissance, we see an Italian palazo where the original coat of arms is now sloppily painted over by a happy face.  Inside, marble and frescoes are almost obscured by grime, discarded clothing and dirty wrappers of street people and broke teenage travelers who inhabit the once spectacular rooms. 

A teenage girl hitchhikes in California, and is picked up by a flashy middle-aged record producer in a sports-car.  Time cruelly has his way with the both of them. 

A twelve year old character tells her story through PowerPoint, although she can’t quite manage the timing of her slides.  You’ll need go to the Internet to see the presentation properly.  Find links for   viewing the slides at your own pace, but also as the character too rapidly sets them.  When you view at your own pace you’ll understand the story, but do take the time to see the girl’s presentation as it clicks along impossibly fast.  This way you can hear the accompanying musical examples and appreciate the author’s sense of humour, both subtle and hysterically funny.

Since technology is the most conspicuous element affected by time in our present day, technology is toyed with here.  In the early 90s a character solemnly declares that one day people will be using technology to chat in real time.  In the 2020s even infants and toddlers own hand held devices that they learn to use intuitively and oh, how they crave them. 

Time often robs, but sometimes blesses.  Some of the characters appear to be at the lowest ebbs of their lives, and yet they surge forward, to enviable heights.   

I read somewhere that ‘and’  is a critical word to our survival, because it’s the concept that the depressed and suicidals forget.  Ensnared by the present moment it is nearly impossible to remember more will follow ‘this’, and that 'more' is limitless and unpredictable. As far as literature therapy goes, if you are bowed by your present situation, read this book.  It can give you some space and perhaps hope. 

If nothing else, this book can graphically remind you that “This too shall pass”.

How far would you go?

Last Man in Tower, by Aravind Adiga

Here in Calgary, we recently had huge floods in riverside neighborhoods, with police helicopters hovering, using loudspeakers to tell everyone to immediately evacuate.  Police also went door to door, just to make sure that everyone was clearing out and heading to safety.  Even so, various individuals refused to budge, insisting that they needed to stay, to protect their home.  What if looters came?  What if it wasn’t really necessary to leave, and they wasted all that effort? 

Eventually, it didn’t matter if looters came or not.  Pots and pans, sofas and grand pianos were swept along in the raging water, along with boxes of jewelery.  The river and sewage water swallowed and took, and the people who had refused to budge ended up clinging to high spots, screaming for help. 

It was frustrating for emergency workers who’d begged them to leave when they could do so easily, and now these people required rescues that risked everyone’s lives.

But who can easily walk away from their home?  In Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, the younger group consisting mostly of software engineers are easily persuaded to leave Tower B, as a developer in Mumbai is offering them huge amounts of money for their aging properties.  But the older group in Tower A are less inclined toward change.  

This tower is older, and its residents have lived there from its beginning.  Despite the money offered, many of them resist leaving, even though their tower has never been properly maintained, and is likely to crash down on top of them at any moment. 

Mrs. Pinto, in late middle age, has been blind for a decade.  She has learned to negotiate her way around the building through practice and skill:  “She knew she had taken three steps down when she reached ‘the Diamond’: a rhomboidal crevice in the fourth step.  Seven steps and two landings later came ‘the Bad Tooth’.  Sliding along the wall her palm encountered a molar-shaped patch in the plaster, which felt like the back of her teeth when they had cavities in them.  This means she had almost reached the second floor.”  Yet even she eventually realizes that in a new building, safe from decay, and with lots of money in her pocket, she can learn to find her way again.

The Socialist Mrs. Rego has a deep distrust of developers, and her home is close to her job, working as a social worker in a neighboring slum.  She rails against moving, but when the figures add up, and she realizes she can return to the better neighborhood she’d grown up in, she takes her teenage children and skid addles.

Eventually most of the tenants let go of personal sentiments and accept the hard fact that the building is going to crumble down soon, whether by accident or purpose.  Where they had deeply resisted leaving before, now they ferociously cling to the new home their imaginations tell them they can’t live without. 

 

But the last man in the tower, once respectfully known as Masterji , but eventually referred to only as Yogesh A. Murthy, puts a crimp in their new style.  He refuses to leave.  A retired school teacher, he forces science lessons on the buildings’ reluctant children, and gets along badly with his own surviving son and daughter-in-law.  Refusing to listen to reason or his own decaying body, he ignores what he doesn’t want to observe.  But as long as one person refuses to sell out to the developer, offers to all the other tenants are off.

This novel reminded me of “The Lottery Ticket” by Anton Chekhov.  People who are at ease with their lives and each other are suddenly contemptuous of their home and relationships in the home because they glimpse an imaginary, more luxurious future.

Adiga’s characters go to extraordinary lengths to protect their homes.  For most, the homes are the imagined luxury they hope to experience, but I couldn’t blame them.  After all, their own building is in a state of rapid decay.  We hear stories all the time of buildings suddenly crashing, wiping out dozens of lives.  They must get out of that building before that happens, if they are to survive.  And they’re being offered the double incentive of a windfall that will pay for a far superior home and lifestyle.  But for Mr. Murthy, the home is the one place he can hide, refusing to see light or reason.

If you are honest about how you might behave under similar circumstances, this novel will make you squirm.  Would you go so far?  Could you actually do that?

As far as literature therapy goes, this novel helped me to better understand my values.  Of course we never really know how we might behave, not till push comes to shove.  Please read this story and let me know what you’d do.

Do you like things that go bump in the night?

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!

The Dark, by Claire Mulligan

There is something delicious about being scared witless, when you know it isn’t, or possibly won’t, or likely won’t really happen to you, at least not tonight.  All my life I’ve loved to savour ghost stories, despite my father once telling me that reading about that sort of thing, or even focussing on that sort of thing, could attract spirits from dark places, and that I was much better off to focus my thoughts elsewhere.  I took all this in with huge round eyes, at the age of thirteen, and for the most part listened to his advice.  But every once in a while, I indulge in the scary. 

While this historical novel is about the rise of Spiritualism in the 1800s and the famous Fox sisters, who created the movement but later confessed to being frauds, this is also one spooky read!  

Although the author gives psychological reasons for many characters’ reactions, there are still strange threads left dangling about button holes, and moist clumps of dirt inexplicably soiling well cleaned floors.  

The story largely settles on the middle Fox sister, Maggie, who is old, penniless, and dying in a garret.  Her life has been clouded with guilt brought on in childhood when she and her sister amused themselves by assaulting a pedlar, and on the ghost games they played on their gullible mother, and then the public.  But although we hear about how the girls were technically able to produce sounds to fool their mother, and then a séance, many other dark mysteries surrounding the girls linger to create an atmosphere that is almost suffocating with anxiety.  If the girls weren’t literally haunted by spirits, they were certainly haunted by the consequences of their actions. 

Although historical fiction is often mocked, this novel is told with such cunning and beauty that it deserves to be read.  This is a fascinating study of human psychology, but also of times and traditions long past.  The sisters are initially afraid of the dark, as an adult warns “Here, folks respect the gloaming don’t they? They know it’s God’s signal to shutter themselves in nice and safe.”

The gloaming.  The very word kicks in some kind of cellular memory that instantly raises the hair on my arms.  

When Maggie and Katie assault the pedlar, he curses them fearfully.  This incident is pivotal to the entire Spiritualist movement, and the ruined lives that unfold.  Along with the curse, he calls them “hoyden bitches” an alarming phrase, although it merely means boisterous or high spirited bitches.  Literally I used a dictionary throughout this book, eagerly looking up such phrases as bonny clabber, apple flummery, lambrequin on the windows, jackanapes, tintinnabulation…  Somehow, these old timey words evoked old memories, as though this book bridges the gap from ancient to modern.  A world where “nasty littles” in shadow grey skin give way to gas light on front porches, and ultimately electric light glowing in every room, allowing people to stay up, and even stay outside for as long as they please, fearless of the spirit infested dark that terrorized earlier peoples. 

The rise of Spiritualism took place when Victorians were celebrating death fashions, plaiting hair of recently deceased loved ones, to be worn as jewellery by the living, taking pictures of corpses that had been arranged to look as though they were merely sitting and reading a book.  

Maggie’s husband (a cad) proposes to her by taking her to a cemetery, and pointing out the grave she will one day share with him if she agrees to be his wife.  The husband is Elisha Kane, the famed explorer who tried to find the lost Franklin expedition.  

You just know the relationship will end badly when he tells Maggie, just before she is about to pour out her heart to him: “You’re so wonderously mysterious, Tuttlie, promise you will always stay so.” 

Humor arises throughout the book, unexpectedly.  At the death-bed wedding of their much older pragmatist sister Leah to a poorly suitor, young Maggie and Katie busy themselves making ‘rum-flips’.  Many puns arise around the word “spirits”.

Unfortunately, the elder pragmatist Fox sister wonders “Has there ever been a woman who has not once worn a cloak made of modesty and manners and piety? Soon the cloak hardens into a shell, which is quite useful, as it keeps one from screaming.”  The time frame is not that far from the Salem witch hunts, and the Fox sisters themselves nearly lose their lives on several occasions when angry mobs swarm, intending brutal murder, enraged by the women’s “ blasphemies”.

The father’s advice to his daughters is powerful:  “The world is God and the Glory is God and everything of flesh and everything of green and God is not one thing, but everything holds its position.”  

He has suffered his own traumatic experiences with alcoholism and ghosts, and finally turns to spirituality, something the girls are quite blind to.  He is powerless to help them.

I will warn this book is long.  The author insists on immersing us in this recently passed world.  There is a fascinating and detailed description of the canal transportation system in Upstate New York, not to mention the cultural shift from heavy drinking to tea-totalling.  Appalling cruelties are everyday stuff, liquor is given to babies, laudanum is prescribed to middle class women.  Slavery is debated and rationalized.  Despite the length, the book is well worth reading, especially if you’re looking for a few chills on a warm summer evening.  Just don’t read it out on your porch, after the sun has set.  Recall Leonard Cohen’s line while reading this, “magic loves the hungry”.  The girls were hungry, in every sense, and the ghosts did oblige.