50 Reparative reading.
The generations who lived under the Romanian surveillance state may not be capable of Sedgwick’s reparative reading. Perhaps no official reparation can mitigate what was lost, given what remains buried. Trauma theory is complicated by culture and socialization (in this case, a socialization into daily terror and absurdity). The paranoia of living on hair-trigger alert rewires the mind towards predicting and preparing for disaster.
Bugan’s investment in poetry as both a form and a dialogic act aims toward what Marianne Hirsch called “reparative writing.” In Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, Hirsch used family photos to engage a “retrospective witness” of the Shoah in Czernowitz (then Romania, now Ukraine). Her “backshadowing” glance is one that reads past through what we know retrospectively, “judg[ing] the participants in these events as though they too should have known what was to come.” The possibility of paranoid reading for Hirsch intersects with historical trauma: she is mystified by the images of normalcy, the smiles on the street, the parasols, the parties. The tension between her parents’ official story and her “corrective reading,” or what she takes to be the task of a historical investigation which cannot help being paranoid, or reading the future into the past, leads Hirsch towards her “reparative reading,” an attempt to apply reparative justice by telling the truer story. But does this betray her parents’ lived, embodied, experience “not-so-bad” take on the events?
Since Bugan focuses less on her parents’ “post-memory” than on her own rememberings, the relationship between reconstructions is different. Unlike Hirsch, Bugan has only herself to betray. And her reading of the files, her insistence on trying to find elusive answers, ultimately relinquishes a “corrective reading” for a lyrical one.
My parents have been faulted for fleeing—for abandoning their family and homeland in search of the American dream.
The caesura is a tiny hole that opens in the floor, or a space which challenges the stability, order, and momentum of everything around it. A gap we can see, or a gap made visible, is a gap which gains significance.
The caesura makes it difficult to ignore the counterfactual, or the way things could have gone differently. Linear narration tempts us to imagine that everything is fated, and things meaning from the momentum built by their seeming inevitability. In that sense, it is tempting to consider my parents’ defection an example of the ‘successful’ American dream.
The problem is that my parents’ dreams never included the United States. They wanted to live near family, in their own language, among their communities and traditions. They fled because it grew impossible. The counterfactual question is what might have happened if they hadn’t fled.
“We wanted to get asylum in France or Tito’s Yugoslavia,” my father explains. “Your mother and I did not want to wind up with an ocean between ourselves and our family.”
He says that staying in Europe was a way of not losing everything, or remaining in proximity to their homeland. But the planned escape to swim to Yugoslavia fell through. In the end, the only country looking for an Eastern Bloc metallurgist was the U.S. The fact that accidents happen doesn’t make them inevitable.
Progress is defined by the movement forward across time.
All the time I’ve been taught is linear—it moves forward, for better or worse, according to calendars. This is chronology, or the logic of time. But I’m interested in how writers imagine time differently. For example, Carmen Bugan’s descriptions of her grandparents’ life in the Romanian village occupy a different sort of time, a time that knows itself in relation to seasons and cycles and religious rituals. Unlike linear time, which moves from a beginning to an ending, and which bases its plans for the future on predicting and improving the ending, nonlinear time meanders through the cosmos, dawdling in eternal recurrence, repetition, and evocation.
Historical time as we know it is linear; the timeline tells us where we are, and where we are in time defines who we are.[1] Most social sciences are committed to parsing linear time because linearity allows Progress to be marked, charted, measured and prepared. Progress, as a metric, exists only in comparison on a line. “Progress” may not be the best approach to describe change in a diffuse network. Ecology traces the links between various threads. We look to the past in order to provide evidence that things are getting better. What interests me about cosmic time, or village time, is the absence of caesura—or the sense in which time flies into something that isn’t articulated by markers. Does time fly toward anything in a circle?
This was fine when we had gods, but flashing past in rapid succession is more difficult under capitalist consumerism, where no flash leaves an impact abjuration, and nothing rests in the mind long enough to feel real or to become an experience.
The selfie is insufficient. The selfie makes us long for the moment when we looked like that rather than the moment when we felt something.
Maybe the looking-like is what’s left of the feeling.
As my children argue over pillowcases, I notice how each explains who did what differently. There is no single version of an event. There is simply the story we tell based on where we were standing in that moment. And what we wanted from it.
When asked to consider whether my parents’ decision to leave me in Romania constitutes a betrayal of obligation or filial love, I have to acknowledge the cultural context: the dominant discourses about parenting, nurture, and love in the U. S.
According to therapists, the fact that I found it difficult to imagine the conditions of their choice means that it was a betrayal–a betrayal that made me afraid of commitment and likely to assume abandonment is part of intimacy.
The therapist’s trauma model makes me a stranger in my own skin. A person whom I am paying money to in a transactional relationship is asking me to forget the nature of our encounter, the appointment, in order to diagnose a complex social space between countries as “trauma.” Maybe applying this ‘label’ allows her to ‘treat’ the problem. Maybe the failure to read difficulty is linked to this inability to tolerate ambiguity that drives the urge to diagnose it and make it “knowable.”
The problem is that we are talking about my parents. and my parents are not here. We are discussing a relationship that can only be a box or a blank for the therapist. We are assuming that knowability is productive, helpful, and life-affirming.
Betrayal is a violation of trust in a relationship where one is the betrayer and the other is the betrayed. American therapy cannot digest or include the police state: it privatizes the entire relationship, even across language, borders, and political systems. The dictator is not in the picture: the culture of dictatorship remains illegible and surreal.
For betrayal to occur, one of the parties in a relationship has to perceive and acknowledge it is such. In this case, my therapist is the one who attempts the definition. She uses words like “neglect” and “attachment trauma.” She reminds me that I wet my pants for months after arriving in the US. She doesn’t consider the fear in a child arriving in a foreign country where everything happens continuously in an unknown language. For the therapist, this country is the ideal. She doesn’t reflect on how the social context might be noisier and more aggressive than the enforced silence of dictatorship, and how a might be overwhelmed by the change in routine. A child might be missing her bed and toys and the linden tree outside her Bucharest window. The world she knows in the language that knew her.
The emotional geography of scents, colors, daily rhythms compose a life. This child will adjust to an unbridgeable distance between that land that made her and the land that will come to define and socialize her expectations. This child will sustain a high degree of tolerance for ambiguity and complexity.
Only the parties to the relationship, the betrayed or the betrayer, can name it as a betrayal. Only they can determine it to be a betrayal. Only they can, through naming, call it into being.
Was I abandoned?
Not in my view. But perhaps my father and mother relate to this word differently. For them, leaving me was also leaving Romania–leaving their home, language, family, and youth. It is hard to think of one — home, language, family, youth – without touching the other.
Whereas, for me, regaining my parents robbed me of Romania. Being part of a nuclear family through family reunification tore me from the secure childhood world, not just a loss of place and familiarity but as demolition, a couple to demolition, of the world that existed. Romania disappeared.
I would not see it again for decades.
Did I continue imagining it?
Yes. Of course. This is how grief operates. We stay loyal to the missing by continuing to imagine it. By making space for the possibility of a middle ground. By refusing to do the practical work of planned obsolescence and resisting the lies.
- (O, we are modern.) ↵