Atacide
This is a formal response essay I wrote for a CNF class with Thorpe Moeckel at Hollins U in Feb. of 2019. I’m putting it up here so I can reference it elsewhere—the theory in it is one I keep coming back to in my processes and analysis so I want to put a pin in it.
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For the purposes of this essay I will be using the Turkish word for parent, ata, to describe the erasure of a parent through writing about them with the term atacide.
The two pieces I will be contrasting, “Matricide” by Meghan Daum (not available online but found in her book The Unspeakable) and “Return to Sender” by Mark Doty. Both deal with the loss of a parent and writing about this loss in nonfiction to process or come to terms with this loss. In Doty’s case, the writing (about one deceased parent) is the cause of the loss of the other (through estrangement), and in Daum’s, the essay is a bald look at her relief that her mother has died, and the essay itself contains her guilt over the act of writing about those emotions. My argument is that the act of writing a parent as a character is inevitably an act of atacide, and both writers are aware of this in these essays.
Memoir is an act of offering up memory to be transformed from fluid matter to solid matter. When a writer crystallizes their parent in the form of nonfiction narrative, in a character on the page, they are accepting the limitations of that representation to outsiders who only have the character and the words of the character to go off of, and admit their parent into a two-dimensional existence in writing from there on out. The writer is well aware (hopefully) that their parent is not so simple or flat as they may appear on the page as a character, but that nuanced and fragmented, unknowable person will eventually be extinguished from memory and supplanted by the calcified, simplified version on the page. Thus the act of writing about one’s parents in memoir, in nonfiction, is an eventual act of historical violence, condemning the parent to eventual erasure by the narrative as set down.
Now this is only partially problematic, in that, without the narrative itself, the parent as a self and a nuanced person would eventually be extinguished by the normal limits of time and memory. So then, the act of writing the character of the parent is a generous act toward the future, sharing with readers a fuller version of the parent as a human than would have been remembered otherwise. However, this is still an act of violence of authority, an act of power asserting dominance over memory and historical narrative.
Daum and Doty are both aware of this--the limitations of memory, the power of writing down memory, and the transformation that occurs from person to character through these acts. Daum, discussing a community’s ability to know a person, writes:
“A lot of people knew my grandmother to be nice as pie, just as a lot of people knew my mother as an incredibly talented theater arts administrator and overall fun person to be around. Neither of those observations was objectively wrong, they just weren’t the whole story. But there again, what can you say to that? In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told.” (“Matricide,” The Unspeakables, 21)
And Doty takes this a little further, applying it to the limits of a writer’s knowledge about the person they are writing into a character, and what they are able to preserve within these limitations:
“For many memoirists, the story we’ll tell is all there’ll be of our characters, or at least all there will be of them as we know them. My sister remembers my other, too, of course, not exactly; there are a set of internal relations, a phenomenology, if you will, that only I can name, because only I have known them.” (“Return to Sender,” A Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, 157)
The mother that his sister remembers is different from the character of the mother that Doty writes into life in Firebird, his memoir about her, and this mother-character is different still from the woman his father remembers and was partnered with. She is fractalled in memory, and Doty is only able to capture a piece of her on the page.
Doty sits with the limitations of this, the threatening reality that his version of his mother on the page is limited and fragmented, but bound to outlast the memory versions of his father and sister. “I wouldn’t go so far as a poet colleague of mine who says that ‘representation is murder,’ but I would acknowledge that to represent is to maim,” (156) he writes, and then later:
“...I forget that to other people, especially those who don’t write, the ability to tell a story, to make language and publish it in a book, is, after all, to be an author; it confers author-ity. I have told the family story now, the author-ized version, and perhaps my father feels powerless to correct it.”
This concern of his with maiming and authority is directly tied to my imagining of atacide: the maiming is of putting limitations on your own memory through representation, and the erasure of other versions of a person’s memory by sheer longevity of the written character.
Daum’s essay is less bleak, as she seems to recognize the dangers of this impulse in the scene where she tells her mother that maybe she’ll become a bird when she dies, and then catches herself, aware that she is putting unrealistic expectations on a dying woman to perform hope for her. This awareness (and possibly some regret through that awareness) seems to drive this piece, which tries to see the complexity of the mother and Daum’s layered emotions about her mother’s complexity, rather than painting the mother as a two-dimensional character. This is nicely reflective of the reality of knowing a person--how limited and fragmented that experience will always necessarily be. And then Daum writes of her mother’s fall into senility, and catches herself simplifying the character again: “For the first time in years, I didn’t merely love her. I actually liked her.”
And then, as if in a karmic act of justice for this judging of her mom and reduction of her personhood, Daum gets seriously ill after her mother’s death and falls pregnant, and then loses the baby, and the reader is made to recall the sense of cyclical justice in all of these mother-daughter relationships. In each generation, the daughter is censured and resents the mother, who is difficult to love and loves badly, until the mother dies--and then the daughter has little time to enjoy her newfound liberty from the oppressive presence of her mother before being face to face with her own death shortly thereafter. Daum’s miscarriage (of a daughter) is a loose end in the cycle, an unresolved pattern that Daum seems to seal for herself through the writing of this story, thereby crystallizing the generational violence and loss in writing for all time and erasing whatever possible alternative versions of these women’s stories might have existed in memory or the community around them.
It is impossible to write a person or a memory of a person fully, and to do so requires choosing (or surrendering to) the power and limitations of the writer’s own narrative. Both Doty and Daum approach this problem from different angles, but at the end of both pieces, their parents are silent and their essays are the definitive version of the story that remains. There is no further nuance available, there are no voices other than the authors’ voices to be heard from. The galaxy of versions of memories of the parents they both write about are reduced to single points of light, with some gradations, but the other perspectives are fundamentally erased, and both authors have made their peace with that.