Writing About Violence, Writing About Childhood

Writing regularly has, for me, inadvertently, contributed to something. Well, to be honest, it has contributed to lots of things. But the biggest thing is, I have again gone back to short story as a reader. There isn't a whole lot of place within academic literary criticism to deal with short stories. Most of us work on "narratives", and that too, novels. So, for a long long time, I was caught up within it too.

In the last few days, I have read a really good short story–"Brownie" by an younger African-American writer, ZZ Packer. “Brownie,” is a look into the intersections of race, disability, class and the ways in which these things contribute to a violent childhood. A lot of the work I have produced as a writer in the last one year is about childhood and violence. The violence of growing up in gendered familial spaces, the violence of the school system, the violence of the playground. I am so not a believer in the idea of an “innocent” child. I mean, kids, as I remember from my own days, are violent. And mean. And cruel. They understand things way more than the adults think they can, they are soaking up the norms of this unequal world very very fast, and because they don’t have the adult polish, they express those violences without any inhibition. So, for me, as a writer, it’s hard to write about kids not because they are innocent, but because they process language differently, they articulate things differently. That’s why, I loved Packer’s story “Brownie.” It addresses all these things, without ever losing track of the childish ways of linguistic and conceptual cognition.

When I first began to write, I avoided going into the crazier places. I would try to skirt around the issues of violence, and write these all-too-pleasant stories, which wouldn't make much sense even to me. I realized that what I am really avoiding is going into my own series of childhood trauma. Trauma of growing up as a little girl. Trauma of growing up within broken political dreams. Trauma of going to school. And a lot more. The thing is, once I began to put myself through that self-examination, it became almost impossible to not write about violence, about the crazy shit that's this world. So after a while, I began to feel, that my writing almost automaticallly is going towards examining how my characters are capable of doing violence to others, or are trying to deal with violence done upon them. Although, I am still struggling with this issue, I think, this realization pushed my writing towards a new direction, towards a new kind of pacing, where I at least try to see how the so-called "bad things" (and I don't mean catastrophic here) lend upon a story lots of tension, make a writer look for multi-faceted characters. But, I think, the flip side of it, in my own writing is, this push has also slowed down my writing in a way. I get too involved in little details. And as much as I think the plot-driven, contemporary American short-story scenario erases too many subjectivities, too many stories, I don't think I want to write a novel or a short-story series like Amit Chaudhuri's A Strange and Sublime Address. So, I am really stuck in this place, how does one narrate stories of childhood and systemic violence through the short-story form?