The news has come out today about a woman imprisoned in a cellar in Austria for twenty-four years by her father, who sexually abused her so often that she gave birth to seven of his children (one of whom he threw in an incinerator). I couldn’t help it, I thought immediately of Cassandra in her wicker basket, married off to her father’s allies, and succumbing patiently to the sexual attention of a priest she seems to despise. I’m sure this Austrian story will be all over the news, and according to the BBC, this is the third case in recent years of ‘people’ being locked in cellars in Austria. Of course, I did a little digging and discovered that almost all of these ‘people’ were women – this most recent case, as well as a girl who was held for eight years by her captor until she was discovered in 2006, and finally a trio of girls held in a basement for seven years by their mother. Why not just acknowledge that the victims of these kinds of crimes are almost always women? The media has been strangely silent on the gendered nature of these atrocities, almost as if it is something profane to speak about.
According to the news reports, these victims were isolated for so long that they began to develop their own language. Of course we’ll never learn that secret language – it will be recorded only as marginalia in the notes of psychiatrists. It seems to me that the language they created is the most profound and amazing part of the whole story, since it is an attempt to transcend the prison of their circumstances and forge a way to still connect and relate to one another, however imperfect. No doubt this horrifies and embarrasses the rest of the media-consuming public, however: the idea of this language growing in the airless dark like a mushroom. But it seems to me that the very way to resist the circumstances that make it possible to lock girls in a cellar is to honor the attempts they make to recapture their subjectivity, in whatever language they use. Perhaps in extremity those girls stumbled onto a very powerful idea: that nothing short of a new language will do to express some experiences.
I’ve started work on a creative project called blight. It began from the writing assignment I did for the week we read Dictee, and Wolf’s essays have expanded my thoughts about it. There are many narratives of loss woven through it – everything from accounts of miscarriage to a Welsh sheep farmer explaining matter-of-factly how hungry ravens pluck out the eyes of his lambs – but I have learned from Wolf and allowed the fragments of each “story” to weave backwards and forwards in time, as if timid about the inevitable. By ‘inevitable,’ I mean precisely: after dealing with the death of loved ones, the narrator must stop speaking and symbolically ‘die.’ This introduces deliberate failure into the text – not just the ending, but also failure within, since there is no way to capture the complexity and horror of loss in mere words.
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