On building altars
This article discusses sexual abuse and contains potentially triggering content for trauma survivors
As I write this, my second poetry pamphlet Mother Night has been out for about two months. It centres around the sexual abuse I endured when I was seven, which has conditioned most of my life. The excitement of having a new book into the world is soon paired with the anxiety of people discovering a terrible secret.
What do you do with yourself when one of the biggest crimes is committed on you and you’re a child? If you’re like me, you most likely wet the bed for a couple of years. My parents didn’t quite know how to handle this. I was already very precociously queer and effeminate. I was called faggot several times before I knew what it meant. I cried continuously, and in my teenage years crying gave way to bursts of rage. I was extremely vulnerable and exposed to attacks from all sides, until the day I could leave that hostile environment. How do you go about putting such gruelling experiences to paper? I don’t know that I can answer that. I realised these were the subjects long since having written the poems.
Some of the best work comes from stumbling in the dark. By not having a specific objective in mind, the subconscious can take over and certain obsessions or preoccupations will seep their way through the mind and on to the white of the page. I believe at the time I was dealing with these events through therapy. I didn’t set out to write about them in any way.
You know the old myth, there is a sorceress, sometimes a goddess, and the hero steals from her a coveted item? So begins a chase where each part morphs into different animals and things in an attempt for the coveted item to be retrieved, until the sorceress turns into a worm and gets eaten by the hero, who has turned into a hen. Or something to that effect.
One of the main traits of this new phase of writing was the abandonment of linear narrative in favour of an orbiting approach. Bits of language would orbit around a central idea using an associative type of logic, a game of transformations if you will, where things summon other things.
Wonder is born out of friction between things that wouldn’t normally be paired. My depressed brain then becomes a cracked glass pane glued & barely / holding together. The further away, the more outrageous the comparison is from the original object, the better the metaphor. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you, as you create the logic of the poem.
As the book progressed my intent was for the poems to reflect that fragmented state of mind that a lot of victims of sexual abuse are afflicted with, the flashbacks and missing bits. It also became apparent that the pamphlet was really a book-long poem in fragments and a project to be considered as a whole.
I’ve been in pieces for most of my life, trying to span out of hay some gold that could fill these cracks. It’s a parlour trick that never totally works. But we all transform. “You must change your life”, to quote Rilke, whose other quote “I have faith in the night” opens Mother Night. And in that darkness I have found refuge. If you sit long enough in the dark you’re able to see things anew, gain a different type of sight.
But how do you physically go back to interacting with the world? How do you renegotiate the relationship between your body and outside forces and individuals? I cannot give you a straight answer. None of us, having gone through this kind of experience, can express how to do this in simple words. In poetry we queerify language to express in images what linear speech can’t.
To mourn yourself is a harrowing and exhausting process. In a quest to re-aligning the senses of your body – you transform.
I’m building an altar to those parts of myself that have died. Or morphed into better things.
So what’s left in the end? Is there part of you that can go back to trusting people? Is a normal life even possible? Let me close this article with one of my favourite pieces of dialogue from Penny Dreadful, a horror-themed tv series where change and transformation are staples in almost every storyline.
“But please do not fear for me. I have no fear myself. The old monsters are gone. The old curses have echoed to silence. And if my immortal soul is lost to me something yet remains, – I remain.”
Image from Mother Night
