{"id":545,"date":"2015-10-18T22:44:19","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T03:44:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/?p=545"},"modified":"2017-12-28T21:59:15","modified_gmt":"2017-12-29T03:59:15","slug":"a-few-thoughts-on-language-trauma-and-and-the-rat-laughed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/a-few-thoughts-on-language-trauma-and-and-the-rat-laughed\/","title":{"rendered":"A Few Thoughts on Language, Trauma and “And the Rat Laughed”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Emily Ronay Johnston, SRPR Managing Editor<\/h2>\n

Emily Johnston\u2019s series \u201cTraumatic Emplacement<\/a>\u201d explores poetics of emplacement, and the simultaneity of dislocation and enmeshment in traumatic poetry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n

\u201cThe writer\u2026 decomposes the world into the most basic concepts,
\nBut presents them the other way around.
\nYou\u2019ll sense it \u2014 the innards pouring out.\u201d
\n\u2013 Nava Semel, And the Rat Laughed<\/em> (p. 95)<\/p>\n

This line appears at the beginning of a series of poems in Nava Semel\u2019s And the Rat Laughed<\/em>, a hybrid-novel that shapes the story of a five year-old Jewish girl whose parents send her into hiding to escape the Holocaust concentration camps. The girl remains unnamed throughout the novel, referred to as the \u201clittle-girl-who-once-was,\u201d \u201cA Little Holocaust,\u201d even simply \u201cGirl.\u201d<\/p>\n

The people who take her in, an anti-Semitic farming family seeking financial gain, lock Girl away in a potato cellar, \u201cthe pit,\u201d where a rat becomes Girl\u2019s steadfast companion. Over the course of the year that she\u2019s hidden there, the family\u2019s teenage son, Stefan, repeatedly rapes the little-girl-who-once-was.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s hybrid-form shapes Girl\u2019s story across 150 achronological years, spanning from 1944 \u2013 2099, and five different genres. Through story, legend, poems, diary entries and science fiction, And the Rat Laughed<\/em> enacts trauma\u2019s rearrangement of time, its scattering of narrative.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s particularly unique about Semel\u2019s fictionalized Holocaust historiography is its sustained meditation on the relationship between trauma and language, and more specifically, on the relationship between what happened and telling<\/em> what happened.<\/p>\n

What happened to A Little Holocaust and telling<\/em> what happened to her resist one another. Poetry makes room for us to, quite literally, read between the lines. Trauma\u2019s un-tellability and its must-tellability converge, creating a new totality of experience.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, the text\u2019s poems \u201cWhy?\u201d and \u201cHow Many?\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Why potatoes?<\/td>\nHow many potatoes?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Because.<\/td>\nThis many.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Why lice?<\/td>\nHow many lice?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Because.<\/td>\nThis many.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Why darkness?<\/td>\nHow much darkness?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Because.<\/td>\nThis much.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
And why the Stefan?<\/td>\nAnd how much the Stefan?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(Pg. 101)<\/td>\n(Pg. 101)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The subterranean innards lead us to the unanswerable \u201cwhy\u201d and \u201chow\u201d of the Stefan as the lines of these poems decompose the extraneous. Potatoes, lice and darkness can be explained: \u201cBecause\u201d or \u201cThis much.\u201d Stefan is left unanswered. The page becomes again blank, here at the poem\u2019s end where\u00a0we perhaps most what to know \u201cwhy\u201d and \u201chow many times\u201d he raped her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

The sequencing of images in these poems shapes Girl\u2019s experience of rape as a kind of violent excavation, a festering-up of the earth\u2019s innards. The potatoes, lice and \u00a0darkness mark where rape begins, ends and will begin all over again. What more do we need to be told of \u201cwhat happened\u201d to understand what did?<\/p>\n

A few pages later, the poem \u201cLullaby\u201d alludes to an answer as to why<\/em> rape happened to her:<\/p>\n

Once upon a time
\nThere was a little Jewish girl
\nAnd she had
\nLittle Jewish hands
\nAnd little Jewish eyes
\nAnd a little Jewish mouth
\nAnd a little Jewish body
\nAnd a big hole
\n(Pg. 110)<\/p>\n

\u201cLullaby\u201d renders each part of Girl\u2019s body Jewish, thereby an object, a receptacle\u2014\u201ca big hole,\u201d a vagina. This is not a lullaby that rocks the body to sleep, but into complacency. This lullaby is preparing the body for rape.<\/p>\n

Time itself becomes flesh, feet\u2014the part of the body that enables Stefan to come and go at will. Time becomes the anticipation of the perpetrator, the aftermath of his visits, their certainty of happening again\u2014anything but naming directly what happened, rape.<\/p>\n

Time
\n<\/strong>The Stefan comes down
\nThe Stefan goes up
\nYesterday is what came before
\nTomorrow is what comes next
\nDown goes the Stefan
\nUp goes the Stefan
\nThat\u2019s how time marches on
\n(Pg. 112)<\/p>\n

Traumatic experience is often theorized as atemporal and preverbal, beyond the scope of a coherent, chronological narrative of what happened<\/em>. What I appreciate in Semel\u2019s poems, however, is their attempt to reverse this premise\u2014to represent trauma as not so much a<\/em>temporal but intra<\/em>temporal, between the layers of \u201cpast,\u201d \u201cpresent\u201d and \u201cfuture.\u201d Their attempt to represent trauma as not so much pre<\/em>verbal but intra<\/em>verbal, literally between the lines. Among poet, language and paper, experience is remapped from bodies that endure rape to a world of bystanders who must remember, must witness\u00a0\u201cthe innards pouring out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2245<\/p>\n

\"Emily<\/a>Emily is from Boston, San Francisco, Fairbanks, Alaska, and Central Illinois. Holding a Ph.D. in English Studies and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing\/Poetry, her work emerges at the intersections of writing studies, social justice pedagogy, trauma theory, film theory, and narrativity. In particular, she researches and publishes on students\u2019 literacy learning in relation to issues of sexualized trauma. She has taught courses in academic writing, public writing, creative writing, gender studies, literature and film, and English as a Second Language. Emily is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Writing Pedagogy at The University of Delaware, and Managing Editor of\u00a0Spoon River Poetry Review<\/em>\u00a0(SRPR).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emily Ronay Johnston, SRPR Managing Editor Emily Johnston\u2019s series \u201cTraumatic Emplacement\u201d explores poetics of emplacement, and the simultaneity of dislocation and enmeshment in traumatic poetry. \u201cThe writer\u2026 decomposes the world into the most basic concepts, But presents them the other … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[203,204,202],"class_list":["post-545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-traumatic-emplacement","tag-and-the-rat-laughed","tag-holocaust","tag-nava-semel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":754,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions\/754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}