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A review by emmkayt
Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin
3.0
Non-fiction, somewhat like an essay collection, except the author is trying to do something less conventional and weaves round and in and out her tale, offering unusually structured sentences and sections. The focus is trauma, histories, how what people experience in this regard shapes their interaction with the world and their core self (or doesn’t). Tumarkin was born in the Ukraine and moved to Australia in her teens, now teaching creative writing in Melbourne. She speaks with people affected by adolescent suicides, an older woman who is a child Holocaust survivor, a community lawyer representing marginalized clients, a woman who went to prison for kidnapping her grandson. I sometimes connected firmly with it and was very struck by some passages and portions, but also found the oblique, in-and-out style frustrating.
Some quotes:
“Perhaps one way of putting it is that many of Vanda’s clients live their lives on a highway where they are repeatedly hit by passing trucks. As they are bandaging their wounds, cleaning them out with rainwater, putting bones back into sockets, another truck’s oncoming. A backlog of injuries functions not unlike a backlog of grief, an expression i first heard near the desert in the Kimberleys where backlog describes the unrelenting holding of funerals on Aboriginal land, leaving the living no time to mourn the dead, creating an imploding paralysis. That is what’s in the tar as well. Most people have a truck going over them at some period in their life. But on a highway you don’t get one or two. You get a convoy. They don’t stop. That’s the point. The recurrence is the point. The point’s the repetition.”
“Certain prototypes assert themselves, usually later in life. And for those who took an oath a long time back to (I do not count myself in this group) under no circumstances become our parents this may feel like a form of possession, or like being possessed. You open your mouth and your mother’s voice comes out complete with your mother’s words. It’s like Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea that every utterance in this world contains in some way all the utterances that preceded it. We contain our parents, doesn’t mean we are them, it means we go from being inside of them to them being inside of us.”
“So this is how it is, I think. Stars rain from the sky like shards of glass. Time makes room for timelessness. Creation is always a catastrophe, a shattering. Everything has already happened. The past does not move through the present like a pointed finger or a shadowy figure in a long cloak. The past is not ‘told you so.’ Not ‘this is how it all began.’ It is a knock on the door in the middle of the night. You open the door and no one is there.”
“[I]n America, America in particular, childhood has for so long been used as self-explanation, or some form of self-diagnosis, and how regularly this verges on a cop-out, personally, culturally, also how blinding such determinism can be, flattening too, like a life’s a by-the-numbers backstory in an undistinguished Hollywood movie. Yet I see as well -took me a while -that of a million things happening to us in Babylon, toddlerhood, prepubescence, some are bound to turn into what Eva Hoffman calls ‘needles.’ Needles that ‘pricked your flesh’ then ‘could never be extracted again.’”
“Survival leaves you knowing both testimony and silence as tainted choices, each riddled equally with despair.”
“A survivor learns how to be alive and dead. A child survivor is a particular kind of survivor: an expert in doubleness.”
Some quotes:
“Perhaps one way of putting it is that many of Vanda’s clients live their lives on a highway where they are repeatedly hit by passing trucks. As they are bandaging their wounds, cleaning them out with rainwater, putting bones back into sockets, another truck’s oncoming. A backlog of injuries functions not unlike a backlog of grief, an expression i first heard near the desert in the Kimberleys where backlog describes the unrelenting holding of funerals on Aboriginal land, leaving the living no time to mourn the dead, creating an imploding paralysis. That is what’s in the tar as well. Most people have a truck going over them at some period in their life. But on a highway you don’t get one or two. You get a convoy. They don’t stop. That’s the point. The recurrence is the point. The point’s the repetition.”
“Certain prototypes assert themselves, usually later in life. And for those who took an oath a long time back to (I do not count myself in this group) under no circumstances become our parents this may feel like a form of possession, or like being possessed. You open your mouth and your mother’s voice comes out complete with your mother’s words. It’s like Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea that every utterance in this world contains in some way all the utterances that preceded it. We contain our parents, doesn’t mean we are them, it means we go from being inside of them to them being inside of us.”
“So this is how it is, I think. Stars rain from the sky like shards of glass. Time makes room for timelessness. Creation is always a catastrophe, a shattering. Everything has already happened. The past does not move through the present like a pointed finger or a shadowy figure in a long cloak. The past is not ‘told you so.’ Not ‘this is how it all began.’ It is a knock on the door in the middle of the night. You open the door and no one is there.”
“[I]n America, America in particular, childhood has for so long been used as self-explanation, or some form of self-diagnosis, and how regularly this verges on a cop-out, personally, culturally, also how blinding such determinism can be, flattening too, like a life’s a by-the-numbers backstory in an undistinguished Hollywood movie. Yet I see as well -took me a while -that of a million things happening to us in Babylon, toddlerhood, prepubescence, some are bound to turn into what Eva Hoffman calls ‘needles.’ Needles that ‘pricked your flesh’ then ‘could never be extracted again.’”
“Survival leaves you knowing both testimony and silence as tainted choices, each riddled equally with despair.”
“A survivor learns how to be alive and dead. A child survivor is a particular kind of survivor: an expert in doubleness.”