A Sense of Dispatch: Memory, Precarity and Breaking of the Silence in The Unwomanly Face of War: Susri Bhattacharya

A Sense of Dispatch: Memory, Precarity and Breaking of the Silence in The Unwomanly Face of War

“I have the hardest time trying to maintain a normal façade when I’m feeling so wretched and sad.^[1]”

-Anne Frank

Any crisis period imprints memory of events in such an enigmatic mechanism that it gets very difficult to locate the internal, psychological and spatial processing which is shared after a long span- either during confession, interview, writing a memoir or narrating the past to the next generation. Svetlana Alexievich has interviewed the women of Soviet and Post-Soviet era who had witnessed war, in her work The Unwomanly Face of War. Through a series of interviews, she had been recording an alternative history of precarious silence now channelised onto words/expressions, and arranging it in an array like an author/auteur of a neo text. In the initial phase of World War II, women wanted to join it out of their love for the country, a collective patriotism which can be a result of faith or, chauvinist hypnotism of the war-hysteria throughout a domineering power nexus. Men were dying and their paucity in the battle field made it almost obvious for war to create requisite space for women. Alexievich has recorded the ‘female point of view’ (Sorvari 105) in War, existing as a subliminal space of silenced memory and almost on the verge of denial or, to be supplanted with traditional objective narrative of history. Primary days of those women in war were of either a drive of ‘megalothymia’ (Fukuyama 85) or ‘Hyperdopaminergia’ (Howes 129) which could have registered an illusory perception of war. Soon, this elated scenario shifted to hint the prodrome of long-term spasmodic tussle with silenced memory, history and rememory. 

Valorous decorations of war beyond arsenal, virility, killing spree and martyrdom, involved specific time (chronos) and space (topos) which had a hideous layer within the memory-corridor. While these real-time incidents were taking place in the external reality, they were imbuing both words, movements, experiences in the internal reality all along with the synergy of silence. During memorization of those events, Alexievich traced that present psychological hindrance inked their narrative direction of past: “…our memory is far from an ideal instrument. It is not only arbitrary and capricious; it is also chained to time like a dog… we look at the past from today; we cannot look at it from anywhere else” (Alexievich xxiv). Therefore, any unidirectional singularity of memory (its linearity) could be an aberration to historical reconfiguration. Only such intense artistry of Alexievich could have recorded so many suppressed psychological responses from a specific chronotope.  Her method of aural knitting, conjured a multifarious existence of synchronic past in a diachronic frame. Alexievich tried to capture the subcutaneous flicker of memory^[2] as if a subjective negotiation with past, recaptured and shared to reflect upon a “former life still lived in us (them)^[3]” (Alexievich 54). A natural distancing of the past is counter-spliced by presenting questions like a ‘radioligand’ or a ‘pre-synaptic striatal’ (Howes 130)- “And would you like to forget the war?^[4]” (Alexievich 97), such a question can be a poker to the substantia nigra; it can disentangle the encrypted subconscious and mummed unconscious. Thus, possibility is higher to have any significant feedback of the vulnerability-quotient out of the embedded semblance of memory. Often the subjects could trace the journalistic manoeuvre; to bring out a sensitive coordinate as if one would utilize the sentimentality as an intersectional buffer or an advertisement to represent the cliched a la carte of trauma. Memory in war, appears capricious and it can betray any such ‘journalist’s trick^[5]’ (Alexievich 65) or, can bring any precarious change in the gender role like Vera Safronovna Davydova who was asked all of a sudden to guard a cemetery at night against the Germans. Nobody considered that she was a woman, guarding at night; she was considered as an equal soldier but she herself was guarding that night with a burden of social-consciousness of being a woman which opened up a quiet channel of gendered memetic vulnerability scripted on to her psyche (plus body) since her birth. She survived and performed her job in lieu of few ‘grey hairs’ (Alexievich 64) which had sprouted probably on the same night as per her belief, out of terrible anxiety. The reaction is kind of similar to what Aida Alayarian has recorded in “Boris”, as an ‘abreaction’ (Alayarian 185) to negotiate the tussle of suppress and dispatch. For Alayarian, Boris is shielded after anonymity but Alexievich was after the stories enrooting the human soul. She had many live-witnesses who contributed different units of her grand array. They were women, nobody wanted to acknowledge their service in war, their voice, their version of memory until it was the article in Pravda by Vera Tkachenko. A surge of interest occurred in their lives. Otherwise very few researches took place like Tom Warland who ventured regarding photojournalism and reportage. He referred to certain posters but long suppressed voices were seething below the Literatura Faktu of history. Alexievich’s role was to curate their past into an ensemble of polyphonic montage. To quote Virginia L Purvis-Smith, Alexievich was trying to bridge feminine ‘ecriture’ and Bakhtinian ‘dialogic complexity’ (45). There was the societal form of meaning-making like women only “whored around” (Alexievich 237) in war but there were unfathomable ‘loneliness’ or an insignificant gratitude for a shoemaker who was allotted the duty to make a size-five shoe (that of a woman’s feet-size), named Parshin (Alexievich 54). For some, memory was a neon portal; the sole aesthetics amidst gory, like Appolina Nikonovna Litskevich-Bairak who embarked upon ‘childhood’ as for her it was not allowed to remember childhood in war, as a Second Lieutenant Commander- “It’s a taboo” (Alexievich 214) but a post-war memorization has a conscious resistance to break away with her incarceration in war-memory. 

War created biological devastations: in terms of killing; wreckage; injuries; brutalities. On the psychological topography its lurid havoc was beyond the traceable locators. Senses were accumulated through body and gravitated accordingly in a diachronic, collective psyche. It is complicated in the verbal signals because of a convoluted presence of cells, matrix, hormones etc., “The body reorganized so much during the war that weren’t women” (Alexievich 195) that the memory too had its precarity out of “Principle of Presentational Concurrence (PPC)” (Rashbrook 471). Psychology was linked to body as war generated amenorrhoea in women and testimonies could be presented from the confession of Alexandra Semyonovna Popova, “” We didn’t have those women’s things… Periods…You know…And after the war not all of us could have children” (Alexievich 195) or, from the depiction of Maria Nesterovna Kuzmenko, “The biological cycle got thrown off… It’s frightening to think that you’ll never be a woman again…” (Alexievich 199). This frightening scenario was much more piercing than any construct of outward show of beauty that had been termed by Naomi Wolf as ‘Beauty Myth’. It was threat to the identity of a woman, more likely to be a cleansing of gender. A woman turns Unwomanly and what Reinhart Koselleck has termed as “present past” (qtd. in Feindt et al. 28) tends to fetch the scorching sensibilities of that time in her present mode of verbalization. Its existence is hideous like subtle core of trauma which is recorded in Liubov Charnaya’s experience. She was a cryptographer and expecting a child when the war emergency compelled her to join war. As a result, she could not give birth to the child and her verbal representation still captures the grudge towards her past participation in a manly war which disabled the womanly instincts and made her commit an abortion. The tug of twin selves is quite understandable in her excerpt where she is lamenting her own decision to join war and do the abortion, “How could I give birth? Tears all around…War! How could I give birth in the midst of death?” (39) and on the other hand, she was trying to posit her anger towards the opponent front, “I wanted to take revenge for this child I couldn’t give birth to” (39). The trauma is clearly reflected out of the internal tussle between the present sense of loneliness for a child unborn out of her own decision and a past sense of twitching the guilt towards opponent to justify her own exemplary decision.  Alison Forsyth refers to Cathy Caruth’s statement regarding such trauma palpable in the hidden junctures of human existence that is stubborn in “its refusal to be simply located” (Etchells et al. 3). While sharing their subjective experience as certain synchronic contribution to the string of polyphonic memory, they show copious tincture of togetherness. Thus, a unitary base, a “tempora” (Feindt et al. 29) compiles the “intersubjective phenomenon” (Pollard 188) in Alexievich’s curation of documentary history. This synchronicity can be located also as in the sense of preservation. Some preserves experiences and memories; some like V. Gromova preserves proudly the bodily scars to commemorate her valour in her, “I don’t see anything for my tears” (114); again, V. Voronova preserves the counts of decoration, the accolades. She does not pine for any losses but certainly she is dissatisfied that she could not bag any massive decoration except only a few medals. For her war is larger than life and the unwomanly attribute, makes one important in war. As she lacks notable accolades, she is unsure whether her story is vital or not, “I don’t know whether you would be interested in my life, but I would like to tell it to somebody…” (114).

Bakhtinian heteroglossia captured a dissonance which helped Alexievich to splice the voices in a dialectical mould. Verbalization of memory or, giving those silent, internal seismicity a voice− has no ruse of preparedness rather they appear more like a slogan of Moscow-based experimental theatre organization named Teatr.doc, “A theatre where they don’t act” (Curtis 3). It was the atrocities of war to distance memory of then contemporary chronotope to the border of ‘repression’ (Freud 63) so far that as per photographical optics, it is similar to that of ‘a blind field’, figuratively exemplified by Roland Barthes as ‘an unlocatable punctum^[6]’ (Barthes 57). A blurred locus, stuck somewhere between emergence and erasure but a totipotent stem that can recalibrate chronotopicity or maintains somewhere a ‘repoliticizing’ (Pechy 178) fervour. At that era, to serve in war, was in itself like a ‘numinous’ archetype (Jung 13); automatically, to present a war-memory should have been an occasion of uproar but voices were reluctant (silent) to recapitulate. It is a dual existence of desire that wanted to forget and again craved for sharing the unshared bulk of suppressed ‘punctum’. It seems to be obliterated but all of a sudden it floods through verbalization, “you remember everything^[7]” (Alexievich 135). Olga Zabelina shared that in her recent activities often past is interposed seamlessly either through song or a music and voice etc., “And there I find what I felt then” (208). Memory as a process or as an emotion, is interspersed with synaesthesia, “The names are erased”, gone from my memory, but the faces are still there…” (122) Memory considers the internal holistic processing without being fastidious with fact. 

Meltzoff and Moore discussed about Active Intermodal Mapping or AIM (Qtd in Pollard 126) which is there in Alexievich’s artistry to trace aural ‘sync points’ (Betancourt 70) or ‘inner-speech’ (Scholz 142) among the survivors and disclose an interlocking pattern of their tremors and tribulations. Alexievich presents the unwomanly with contrapuntal array of voices. If the first, locates her, not as an ‘object of the gaze but coagent’ (Ty 100) then the other would certainly thrash her as Beauvoirian ‘Second Sex’, the invader in the men’s territory- the misfit. “Towards a Bakhtinian Practice of Psychotherapy” — Rachel Pollard has significantly proclaimed that, “Consciousness is an intersubjective phenomenon and selfhood is interdependent on other selves” (188); this can be a cohort of the women question in the entire motif of Alexievich’s projection. A conglomerative whole for women’s susceptibility in war; motherhood; pregnancy; women’s toil; their saves; their kills; their activity; their fear everything together creates the ‘womanly’ seething below the ‘unwomanly’ ascriptions. Overcoming the self-reflexive and state-controlled^[8] ‘repressive measures^[9]’ (Coetzee and Hulec 80) of the versions of war, they spoke about their subjective encounter of the image of women in war. Initially which was desirous for recognition or “megalothymia”; what had it earned them post war, beyond poster-recognitions and marginal coverage in the footnotes of history? In the post-war sequence if a woman was crippled due to any war-injury then her fate was sealed; she was not any brave heroine or any role-model but a burden (not a marriage-material); she was conjectured to be a sexual object to please many men fighting the war without their own wives. Her sole service was believed to be catering towards the pleasure-principles while many voices in Alexievich presents a counter-narrative of the former view. Their toil is never acknowledged in the history, “in the human scale” (“In Search of” 6) and mostly got washed away by the vortex of social imposition of the ‘truth’. Alexievich’s method of Bakhtinian presentation locates one voice of assonance. The story of Sofy K−vich^[10], who confessed her love for a military serviceman to whom she was a ‘campaign wife’ (Alexievich 235). Her voice is different from Liubov Fominichna Fedosenko who survived a terrible Messerschmitt and went on to find out her husband on the front. This dichotomy of being wife and a campaign wife has been wonderfully caught in the arrangement of the narrative. Towards the end of Sofya K−vich’ s story, she confessed that her daughter never appreciated her love for such a father who had never acknowledged any relationship post-war but Alexievich caught the precarious answer of this legitimate question in the answer of her namesake, that is the story of Sofya Krigel (Sergeant Major, Sniper), “if I hadn’t fallen in love at the war, I wouldn’t have survived. Love saved us. It saved me” (235). In the same page two different voices are bringing out the synchronic linkages of vulnerability and resilience^[11] (Alayarian 133), as a ‘ceaseless spatial negotiation’ (Berger 98) within the diachronic frame of chronotopicity.