Writing Family

I am getting interested in poetry-projects which explore family as a site of creative exploration. It is difficult to write about family for me, not because my family was abusive or anything dramatic like that, but I find that within families, the rhetoric of love operates in complicated ways. On the one hand, members of a family are supposed to love each other blah blah blah. But also on the other hand, love is the site through which the family performs social control. In fact, I would argue, within families, love operates as a site of domination rather than liberation. Intricately related to the familial rhetoric of love, is also the cycle of never-ending gratitude. Yes, family members help you out during times of stress. In return, they expect eternal gratitude. As individuals, we are often compelled to depend on our family's resources, particularly because there are very few social networks/collectivities which provide us with the kind of support our families do. Yes, I am saying the inevitable. Family is a social mode of resource allocation. In the recent years, I have noticed more and more that people form families and stick to families not because there is a whole lot of great love between them. More often than not, these are economic decisions. I mean, it's not hard to decipher, is it? A cursory look at the tax laws, other economic benefits would prove the point. Of course, not all families receive the same kinds of benefits. Totally truly true. But at the same time, the structures have evolved in such a way that there is no perfect family anywhere. At least I haven't come across any. I have met individuals who demand that their family lives are perfect, but to my judgmental, cranky self, it just appears that most of them are invested in mystifying the process of familial domination, rather than peeling it open.

Writing about family entails that one examine the rhetoric of love that underlies it. It's easier to write about abusive families because they are read as anomalies anyway. I am not saying it's easier for the individual concerned to come to that space where he/she can translate in language his/her trauma of living within an abusive family relationships. But in the last thirty years or so, there has evolved a language in which one can write about abusive family relationships. What is harder is to write about the perfectly normal families, families which are supposedly filled with love. It's harder because one has to break open the love-rhetoric, one has to show how love and domination can and do co-exist. And I will go so far as to say that human beings as a collectivity haven't yet been able to evolve notions and patterns of love which would be free of power and domination. And once one recognizes that, the big question is, how does one resist? How does one snatch oneself out of this eternal chain of familial gratitude which had been evolved to curb individual growth? And in certain cases, even collective growth? My own answer is, well, we need to learn to be ungrateful. But that's fucking hard. None of us (me included) wants to be identified as the ungrateful, irresponsible one. And sometimes, there are real concerns. I mean, I wouldn't like to see my parents or any of my other family members suffer in old age. I wouldn't like to see any of my cousins starving. And if my putting in something will help them, I will try to do that. In my everyday life, I am close to being the ungrateful, irresponsible daughter, sister, cousin, niece whatever. But I am not fully there. I am too polite, too soft to complete the circe of distance between myself and my family.

That's why, in my writings, these days, especially in my poems, I am trying to create this persona who is an ungrateful daughter. She is ungrateful because she dreams of something bigger than familial love, something more intense than kinship. She doesn't expect much from family. She tends to leave rather than stay entangled. It's hard to write about such a persona, because the language is not yet available. I am trying.