The name of the American woman Carmen Maria Machado became known to the reader after the publication of the collection "Her Body and Others" - a collection of highly unusual, pretentious phantasmagoric and at the same time unpleasantly believable stories that touch on topics ranging from gender inequality and domestic violence to the fragility of boundaries separating reality from fantasy, and the norm - from madness. In a sense, The House of Illusions, the writer’s debut in large form, continues the same line, but in a completely different manner and on a fundamentally different material. Machado moves from a scary tale to a dryish autobiography, and from a dizzying flight of imagination to a reflexive and verified essayism. Perhaps only the main theme remains unchanged: the House of Illusions again talks about violence and how difficult it is to reliably draw that thin line beyond which ordinary irritability turns into pathological cruelty, and irresistible unpredictability into painful sociopathy.
"The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember. —Sarah Manguso" ― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
The main plot of "House of Illusion" is formed around a rather ordinary and understandable collision of life: acquaintance, passionate love, delightful sex, joint plans, the first alarm bells, unexplained outbursts of rage, threats, insults, again delightful sex, habit, cooling, again rage, fear , manipulation, humiliation, alienation, rupture, misunderstanding, pain and, finally, healing. Basically, Machado doesn’t bring much new to the canon of “stories of failed relationships,” minus the fact that both the author and her partner are women. And this circumstance suddenly turns out to be much more significant than it might seem at first glance.
Lesbian relationships are both stigmatized (“what else can you expect from these perverts”) and idealized (“only in union with her own kind, a woman can completely free herself from all the troubles of patriarchy”), but stigmatized, perhaps, nevertheless more often. And in this context, an open conversation about violence in homosexual couples looks like an analogue of the notorious taking out garbage from the hut and pouring water on the mill of an ideological enemy: all the worst suspicions that the public, wary of unconventional connections, have thus turned out to be true. So, in this ethically ambiguous situation, is it generally worth starting a conversation on a similar topic, or is it better to wait for the normalization of attitudes towards homosexuals and only after that raise it in full?
This is the first aspect of the problem that Carmen Maria Machado faces in trying to find a language to talk about her experiences, but there are others. We are used to the fact that the very term "domestic violence" or "violence in a couple" describes an action directed, so to speak, from top to bottom - from a stronger partner (man) to a weaker one. A man who himself finds himself in the position of a victim often evokes not sympathy, but an ironic smile. What can we do when it is basically impossible to understand who is in the position “from above” in a situation of violence and whom we should sympathize with?
And finally, is it worth talking about violence if the victim cannot show the interested public neither bruises, nor fractures, nor even a certificate from a psychiatrist confirming clinical depression or suicidal tendencies? Yes, over the years that Machado was in a relationship with her partner, she used to be scared, and physically hurt, and very cold (once she had to spend the night outside in the cold, fleeing the anger of her raging friend). But nothing really catastrophic happened to her - yes, in general, it could not have happened: her girlfriend, of course, was a manipulator and psychopath, but not a sadistic and certainly not a maniac. How to find the point beyond which the violence is insignificant, passing, almost accidental, turns into something more? And is it right to wait for this transition to happen?
In an attempt to deal with these moral dilemmas, Carmen Maria Machado plunges into a surprisingly meager space of someone else's documented experience. Homosexuals who have experienced some form of violence in couples are surprisingly even more invisible than their heterosexual companions in misfortune. The amount of research, reflection, and evidence Machado can draw on is not so great - but she works through them all, trying, in fact, to form a new language for talking about the situation in which she finds herself. Based on the stories of women and men who have experienced physical or psychological violence from partners of the same sex, she, by trial and error, not so much plots, as dotted lines, marks the path leading to the understanding and description of such collisions.
And the key to this is the famous phrase of the poetess Pat Parker from her poem “To a white man who wants to know how to be my friend”: “First, forget that I am black. Secondly, never forget that I am black. " In other words, Machado is convinced that violence in gay couples should be talked about and thought of in the same way as about any other violence, without ever forgetting the entire context behind it. And although this method can not be called either simple or self-evident, if you think about it properly, it becomes clear that human civilization cannot offer anything better at the moment. Yes, it is necessary to forget. Yes, you can't help remembering.
The reader who has reached these lines has most likely managed to ask two questions more than once. Firstly, isn't it just another example of the so-called “agenda” literature, which hastily and rudely fulfills some (mostly imaginary) requests of the American left-liberal establishment? And secondly, what does all this have to do with Russia, in which there is not only a consensus on the subject of violence among homosexuals, but even on the issue of ordinary domestic violence, there is a flourishing pluralism.
The first question is relatively simple. Being directly experienced, passed through, imbued with non-borrowed, genuine emotions, any "agenda" immediately turns into high relevance without any derogatory quotes. It is this relevance - in contrast to superficial topicality - that has, by the way, a good chance to survive fashion and go down in history as a significant evidence of its time. And it is precisely this that Machado demonstrates, striving to experience, realize and verbalize his own very painful and difficult experience.
But with the second question, the situation is somewhat more complicated. Indeed, most of the things that Carmen Maria Machado writes about are quite far from our realities. Thus, a Russian reader may be surprised at how little resistance the author's relationship with her girlfriend meets from outside - neither the parents (in both cases, representatives of the rather conservative layers of the middle class) nor friends feel the slightest embarrassment or displeasure about their homosexuality. ... With the almost complete absence of environmental pressure, which to one degree or another all gays and lesbians in Russia face, the problems within the couple themselves look not so far-fetched, but, say, delicately, exaggerated. It is really difficult to argue with this - but this (at least in part) is the social significance of the "House of Illusions" for the Russian reader.
Due to its deliberately narrow perspective, leaving everything social and focused on the personal, this book (like, for example, Mikita Franko's book "Days of Our Lives") shows gay relationships as normal - not horrible in nature, not ideal, not incomprehensible and alien, but, for all their specialness, little different from the usual heterosexual relationships. Those who have the right to exist along with any others, based on the mutual consent of adults, and lose this right when this principle is violated. And this effect, obviously not planned by Carmen Maria Machado, is suddenly very useful and therapeutic.
This article was sponsored by J Paul Jordan.
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