These Ghosts are Family, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Maisy
Card, Brutality, Trauma, Memory
Hans Loewald characterized the psychoanalytic goal as “turning
ghosts into ancestors.” In her debut
novel, Maisy Card clarifies how, without some kind of intervention, ghosts go
on influencing us for generations. Though
the novel ends with a Jamaican ghost story that is incredulous to us, even
after our immersion in Jamaican slave culture and its after effects, the ghost
stories, and the way they are intertwined throughout the novel induce (in at
least this reader) the experience of being disoriented, confused, lost and, in
a word, haunted by what has gone before.
Card begins the book by asking us to imagine ourselves as
first one person and then the next.
These are people who are briefly introduced, people who will all become
minor characters in a novel where it is the family – the composite picture –
perhaps even the culture, that is the major character. As we are asked to identify with first this
and then that character – on the day that a father will finally meet his daughter;
the day of his death – perhaps, he wonders, at her hands – we are misled into
thinking that the novel will reconstruct this man’s life and we will be led
back to this moment with greater understanding.
O.K., we can return to that moment and it will be much
richer for having read the novel, but the point is not to understand this man –
in fact he, and perhaps all of the main characters, remain somewhat
mysterious. Those who are written about
most distinctly – the white descendant of the slave trader who ends up marrying
into the slave side of the family – are clear, but also somewhat cartoonish in
their clarity – those least tainted by the brush of the collective trauma are
the least mysterious and therefore the least interesting.
If the story were told in a straightforward, linear fashion,
it would be a much easier read. An Evil Man,
a slave owning Englishman in Jamaica, running a sugar plantation, is presented
with a lily white 14 year old wife from Iceland who produces a daughter and
then a son before killing herself. The
son dies at a young age and the daughter grows up believing she can do no wrong
– her best friend from next door gets blamed for all her transgressions.
The best friend, it turns out, appears to be white and is a
ward of the neighbor, who is employed by the slave owner to keep the books on
the plantation which, unlike the townhouses that the central characters
primarily live in, is located deep in the bush of Jamaica. After a slave uprising, when the plantation
is burned, the girls get caught up in a plot to kill the plantation owner – a plot
that is based in part on the anger of former worker for the plantation owner –
and this former worker is, perhaps, the father of the neighbor girl and he is certainly the one who reveals to the neighbor girl that she is not white.
And already things are starting to get murky. Why would a daughter want to kill her
father? Could it be that the two girls
are sisters? Part of what unites them in
apparent murderous rage against their father(s) is, for the acknowledged descendant,
a hatred of the man who never really sees her, for the next-door neighbor, the
realization that she is not white – and then disgust that her caregiver, who
was rebuffed by her mother, has now proposed to her.
As confusing as that last paragraph is, it actually makes
more sense when we finally arrive at this information in the penultimate
chapter – in between we have seen the impact of the slave and plantation system and its dissolution on the family – and on the little town that emerged around
the destroyed plantation, and on a wide variety of characters, many in the
present, who are dealing with the impact of what happened almost two centuries
ago.
That said, the threads connecting those long-ago events with
what is happening currently are as fragile, disjointed and unintelligible as
the lives of the people affected by them would be if we didn’t have the
backstory to make sense of who the people are now.
This house of cards is built through a series of short
stories – or chapters – that center around one or another member of the family,
and the reader is constantly referring back to the rather sketchy and confusing
family tree at the beginning of the book as an essential means of keeping some
kind of balance and orientation in a book that is incredibly well planned and
executed and is, I believe purposefully, completely confusing.
The reader is confused, on purpose, as a means (I don’t know
whether intentionally or simply through artistic voodoo) of inducing in that
reader the lived experience of being this or that character in the novel. To pick a character at random – the son of the man we
are asked to imagine ourselves to be at the beginning of the novel (the man
who is about to die) – his son (the person I am referring to now) was born and spent the majority of his life in
Jamaica. He assumed that his father had
died long ago, in part because he was raised with the money that came from the
life insurance his mother had taken out as well as insurance from his father’s
job when his father was working in England to send money home to the family,
and was reported to have died.
Not aware that his father was still living - that the death occurred to another man that the white owners of the company confused with his father, and his father, believing he was releasing his wife from a husband she despised, took on the identity of the man who actually died; the son went to
Brooklyn – where his father now lived – after his mother died. He discovered there, on the streets, the man
who, when he was a boy, had performed an exorcism on his mother – and the son
only now is able to recover the memories of that horrible event.
Did I mention earlier that this is a brutal book? It is…
And the brutality is essential.
The slave owner was cruel beyond belief to his slaves. Enslaving others in the Jamaican fashion and
that of the American South was brutal. The exorcism was brutal. We are subjected to those brutalities – both in the exposure to the
descriptions of them, but more essentially in the confusion that we feel, just as
the son does, about who did what to whom when.
This patchwork experience of remembering the book mirrors the patchwork
experience of memory that these and other trauma survivors experience. And being essentially foggy – about who it is
that I am, how I have come to be this way and what will happen next – does not
allow us to turn ghosts into ancestors – it preserves the ghosts as ghosts, and
we feel haunted by what occurred, it lies outside of our consciousness, but impacts our actions, and also what we
inherited, unseen, from our forebearers and their experience – their being
haunted by their own ghosts.
So the ghosts at the end of the novel – three little girls
who run away from the funeral of the mother of the son, the mother who had an
exorcism and claimed in the middle of it that those around her saw her as
possessed because they couldn’t recognize what a free woman looked like – those
three little girls ran back to the place from which all of this brutality emanated
– the plantation town, now a little bit of rural nothing in the middle of nowhere.
The girls, two sisters and a cousin, lured away by the lover
of the exorcised mother – a man who felt spurned by the mother’s denial of him
as her lover and a person who was disposed of now that caring for the mother
was of no use to the family – took these members of the family back to the
ancestral home to forage on their own – and they transformed into the ghosts of
Jamaican folklore. Cared for by everyone
and no one, not sustained by meat and vegetables, needing blood to survive,
these vampiric creatures preyed on the townspeople until they were forced to kill
them – but, of course, you cannot kill ghosts… they are family.
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