Books and Berries

Got too lost in the sauce now it's 3am

"um, what are you reading, kurosaki-kun?"

"oh, this? medical text."

hanataro looks bewildered "why are you reading a medical text? um, if you don't mind me asking, that is..."

"Oh, I haven't told you? I'm planning to become a doctor."

I am a Nigerian prince and need to stash my millions of dollars. I would like you to give me access to your bank account so I can deposit the money.

With kind regards,

i remember entering his office with my tape recorder, sitting in a chair that was too big, and asking him questions about war, and his life after war, while swinging my legs over the edge of the chair. i remember being very, very quiet as he spoke of pulling the car over on the highway for fear of crashing when his hands would shake uncontrollably in response to song on the radio or a smell that he couldn’t be sure was real or sense-memory. and of ruined relationships and anger and american hypocrisy. 

and i also remember that was the day i learned what “valor” meant. he used “valor” in a sentence and i didn’t know that word, and when i asked him to explain “valor” he became very quiet. and i can’t remember precisely what he said, if he ever offered me the dictionary definition or not, but i do remember him looking very sad, and saying something about our country’s idea of “valor”, and also something about a broken promise. and there was an edge to his words that i couldn’t parse at the time that i would later come to understand was bitterness, that he sounded bitter. 

I was a huge reader as a kid - It was the classical combo of undiagnosed ADHD + escapism from the abusive environment you're trapped in. But I was quite young and every book I'd read so far included either nice and loving or absent parents. Combined with being trained into a strong, unspoken familial culture of complete secrecy, I didn't know what parental abuse was or that it also happened to other people. I thought it was just me.

Then I read an old book, we might have had it in our shelves from my own parent's childhood. It was about the life and adventures of this little girl in Spain during the 1920s. Probably meant for young teens to read.

It was written a long time ago, and likely the first time I had such a dynamic glipse into how day to day life in the past had been, which I found fascinating and charming. But you see, the little girl was also really mischievous, as many protagonists in children's books are. And during the 1920s physical punishment and abuse of children was really normalised. So the writer obviously didn't think twice about including it.

It was clearly meant to be justified, even a moral lesson for the reader. The little girl was supposed to deserve it. You see, she had acted selfishly, in a way that ended up wasting money for the family and created a bunch of work for the live-in housekeeper/nanny. So she got spanked, perhaps with a switch, though my memory is quite foggy. What I remember most was how she cried, maybe even felt betrayed, and especially my own extremely emotional reaction to it.

It was the first time I had ever seen a parent in any fictional work violently assaulting their child. It was the first time I could see my own life and circumstances reflected somewhere. It wasn't just me, this happened to other children. And I knew exactly how she felt. It broke my heart. I sobbed terribly while hugging that book. I knew in my bones that no matter what, she didn't deserve that, she was just a kid who had made a mistake.

The book didn't dwell on it at all. She continued being a mostly happy, naughty child having small, fun misadventures or problems. It was just normal discipline at the time it was written. But in the context of my own life as an abused kid, it was revolutionary. I internalised the compassion I felt for her, and for every victim of abuse in every book I read after that (Angela's Ashes was incredibly impactful in a similar way eventually), and that became part of what protected me from the relentless pressure to internalise the abuse I was suffering as being my fault.

Literature offered me an external frame of reference outside of the reality my abusers tried to create, and that 'outdated' children's book was like a life raft for me. Children get treated like they uncritically absorb anything they read, but that's not true. They are capable of more, especially if they have trusted adults to discuss what they're reading with, and they always bring their own lives and opinions into their interpretation.