That Calm is but a Wall

Last week I read Speak by Laurie Andersen. (Apologies to my group from Tuesday as this is a reiteration of our discussion). While there are aspects of this book I find flawed (Gail, I think, addressed some of these in her post for week one), there is also a beautiful articulation of the isolating numbness that follows an unspeakable experience. When the book opens, it is several weeks after a traumatic event has happened to the protagonist. This trauma causes a rending of her psyche, a disjuncture between her lived experiences and her interior ones. She observes herself living. This performative reconstructing keeps the fractured part of the self at bay. As I was noticing the ways the author reiterates the performative structurally (In places she even writes the dialogue in script form), I began linking trauma induced performance with both the ways teens ‘try on’ identities and the performances of the young women in the girls gone wild article. My reading for ‘myself’ this and last week is a book called Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos. It too, has a traumatized young girl constructing her daily life in a performative way that both distances and protects her. As in Speak, everyone is struggling, to varying degrees, with finding and living his or her authentic self. Isn’t this what we are all doing? We get comfortable then something disrupts that comfort. We have to learn to live with the new scars. In a sense, for a while, we practice; we perform. I think this trait is both adaptive and important for identity formation. Possibly, it makes identity dynamic. By the time a person is in his or her late teens, it could be that he or she has had lots of practice at distancing a hidden, interior self from a performative one. So, is there something about our culture that over accentuates performance? Perhaps the cultural collusion of peers, camera and choice make the GGW experience seem distant. While this doesn’t explain why these young women are willing to spread their legs on camera, it might indicate why they can picture themselves as unscathed by it.

In any case, I recommend both books. I think I might teach Speak with Emily Dickenson.
Therese