Complacency and erasure: the co-option of narrative

[kaberett]

[Content note: abuse]

There is a poem by Phillip Larkin. You know the one: They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do...

It is bleak, and it is resigned, and it is gentle, and it is true.

And every once in a while I see somebody praising Adrian Mitchell's saccharine, self-congratulatory rewrite, and the world drops out from under me. Because: how dare you. How dare you. How dare you take my truth and painstakingly paint over it. How dare you take this thing, this thing that is mine, and tell me that it couldn't really have happened like that. How dare you look to me, smiling, and say -- no, that didn't occur.

You should be horrified by what has been done to me. I will not fold myself smaller for your convenience and comfort, to ease your forgetting. I will not fucking smile for you. Tell your own stories, by all means, but if you cannot understand what profound insult it is to hear my truth (my bitter, compassionate, accepting truth) and to twist it, to sweeten it beyond bearing and beyond breaking, because you cannot stand to believe me -- if you cannot understand what profound insult it is to smiling silence me because you do not wish to hear -- if you would look away and smugly say: the world is not, is never like that; let me tell you how it really is--

-- then you bear the guilt for the children who, like me, are ignored and overlooked and inconvenient.

How dare you chiding, stifling, hush us. How dare you bid us pray be sweet and silent. How dare you -- how dare you -- make of us a sacrifice to your comfort.

Shame upon you.

Comments

[silverhare]

Good grief. I had never read that rewrite, and that is- horrific. It's cruel, and it minimises and it covers up and coats over and pretends everything is all right. It mythologises childhood and parenthood, and that is so dangerous and utterly false.

By the way, thanks for the link to that Carol Ann Duffy poem - it was a really nice gut-punch. (Idk how that could be nice, but it was. I think it was the sense of empathy and familiarity with that situation.)

My father, portraying to me his view of both parenthood and childhood, recited This Be The Verse so often to me that I could repeat it accurately by the age of eight. It made for an amusing Poetry Day one year at primary school, where I entertained my fellow nine-year-olds...

[untonuggan]

aragahgahga yeah I just read the rewrite myself. it does all those things, and it's insipid.

[quartzpebble]

And I could read it as just insipid (which, you know, is true for tons of poetry, and it's not like this one's the worst ever for idealizing/mythologizing childhood) if not for the title, which manages to both swipe at "This Be the Verse" itself and assert that getting "tucked up" *is* the Worst that happens to a child.

[kaberett]

I am genuinely impressed by how many of you have gone and looked it up after I deliberately didn't link to it and was this incandescently furious about it :-p

You're very welcome for the Duffy; I met it at GSCE English and it was a fuckin' life-raft.

(As I have managed to articulate elsewhere, some of the issue with That Fucking Poem is that it's not even something that could be described as being - in the literary sense - "in dialogue" with the Larkin: because there is no conversation here, just someone speaking over uncomfortable truths they don't want to hear, and literally re- and over-writing our histories.)

[silverhare]

:) *general noise of "I read this and yes"* /autistic night-blogging