Whale Song by Dominique Sinagra

Whale Song

BY DOMINIQUE SINAGRA ILLUSTRATED BY JENNIFER GARWOOD

This story begins with a seemingly straight forward narrative and voice – matriarchal bitterness and the struggle between generations of women. The story also seems linear and autobiographical, almost following the tone of an essay. As the piece continues, it becomes magic realism, no longer based in a linear structure. The second half of the piece is inspired by Women Who Run with Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who uses myth and fairytale from different cultures to explore the idea and archetype of the Wild Woman, the source of life, and the bestower of life and death.

When I write I scratch and bite myself. I inherited this behaviour from my mother, whose favourite pastime is china hurling and my grandmother who pulls her hair out and shrieks the way some people go jogging; it clears her mind and refreshes her. My matriarchal line is a rageful one. We are prone to flying off the handle, devouring nearby heads, and when there is no head nearby, we’ll try to devour our own. Many women, from my observations, usually halt before the steps of power. Walking up to these is not the problem, nor is recognizing them, but at the threshold, that final step, the history screaming in their bones, usually tightens and pull them to standing, and unconscious petrification. In this moment women usually do one of two things. They either grow very loud or very quiet.

We tend to dance between both. We run and hide, avoiding our bills, that phone call, the dishes, and then when, inevitably the phone still rings, the bills add up and the

dishes don’t get done, we feel we are not listened to, so we smash the dishes, throw the iPhone out the window and declare literal or figurative bankruptcy. You see, we’ve all been dead since as long as we can remember and have been dying consistently thereafter. I do not mean the good kind of dying, the orgasmic, or the “oh my god I like died,” because the dress was so cute. No, this is the knitting needle kind of dying, the witches stake kind dying.

My mother and my grandmother having been duelling since my mother’s conception or killing each other over and over in a “Tag! You’re it!” game of shames. My mother got the first punch in, when she bound herself, as a fertilized egg, to the lining of my grandmother’s womb. Then my grandmother came in heavy and decided to terminate her. This killed my mother but she refused to die. In utero refusal to die, is a funny thing. It is the supreme rebellion, usually saved for adolescence, and an amazing feat that something so small could wreak such havoc on a life, on a life plan.

As revenge my mother made sure my grandmother got fat. At the time my grandmother was living in her dorm room, but was soon too large for the condition to go unnoticed, so she moved off campus with Lila, her rich friend. She continued with her classes and no professor ever noticed — just goes to show not to underestimate the power of denial.

On May 10th my grandmother and my mother delivered two of their most lethal blows to each other. My mother’s by being born and my grandmother’s by birthing her at the Salvation Army Hospital for Unwed Mothers and then leaving her there. My grandmother tends to give things and then take them away, like tables or oriental rugs, or in this case motherhood. She’d give things as birthday presents and then a few years later, decide that they were hers and she’d like them back now, please. She didn’t always say please. After my mother’s birth, my grandmother gave her the parting shot of her name, Jane (which didn’t stick). Two weeks later, triumphantly graduated wearing a white dress and taking smiling photos with her father. For 30 years my mother attempted to live. Life is, after all the name of game here on Earth. If you don’t watch out, green sprigs will come up through cracks in concrete and a car left for to long on the roadside will become home to life and eventually be consumed by green vegetation.

But 30 years later my mother returned, the way the hero, or in this case heroine in

fairy-tales returns from the shadowy land where she’d been banished, carrying with her an elixir to save us all. My mother delivered a winning hand to my grandmother when she returned 30 years later, with a two year old on her back (me.) First she searched in a Key West, Florida, where my grandmother had lived, working and writing about a treasure hunt. She had a handsome book deal, but when it came to actually writing about the book she just shrieked and pulled her hair out. Then when the publishing company came knocking, she hired a very good lawyer and claim Writers’ Block as her disability, got a payout from the government. She then packed up and moved back to New York City, where my mother finally tracked her down. My mother sent a letter, laden with clues that only a woman who had birthed a baby on May 10th, 1958 in Brookline, Massachusetts, and named it Jane, would understand. My mother signed the letter, Emily, because that was her name now. Upon arriving receiving the letter my grandmother dropped down and died. She didn’t come out from whatever piece of furniture she’d died behind until Christmas, when we came to visit.

“It turns out, I have a daughter. I gave her up for adoption,” my grandmother said to the doorman.

“Does she forgive you?” the doorman asked back. My grandmother scuttled off and mumbled something about how she was sure he was the one who stole her opal ring.

My grandmother and my mother have been trying to kill each other since they met, way back when my mother was just a cluster of cells and since they re-met 30 years later. My mother, every time she sets down to write “the book”, or balance her check book, she usually ends up in china hurling rage, because it is Granny Jane’s fault she can’t balance her check book or finish anything because everyone knows people who are adopted have problems finishing things. My grandmother likes to point out that all Emily’s clothes look like she pulled them out from under the bed after the poodle slept on them, and a house this messy isn’t normal and perhaps we should call someone? Then she always reminds me that if I tell mother, I’d lose a confidant, not to mention the best editor around.

My mother talked about killing herself all the time and remarked on whether or not it was normal to imagine the flashing lights coming to take away the body. And my grandmother lives on a cocktail of anti-depressants and trays of fudge that she eats

in bed whilst reading 99 cent mysteries she buys on her iPad, each of which keep her from diving off the Tobin Bridge and sinking to the bottom of Boston Harbor. It seems that for both of them their own existence is reason to contemplate suicide.

I’ve come to the conclusion that in order for me to survive, I might want to scrape myself free from the tradition of self denial, annihilation, and sabotage, and to do this I figured I’d better go back to the beginning and have a chat with one who started it all.

If you slide back through time in my family tree you’ll go tumbling into sea grass and codfish brains, fish scales under the finger nails, breezy Rhode Island summers and teddy bears that smelled of salt. You’d go tumbling into sailing boats, and the world fair in Saint Louis. You’d find a hell of a lot of shame, angry women, who are mean as snakes and spite full women. You’d find fat brothers. You’d find yourself falling into Plymouth plantation, but before that you’d be kidnapped by Indians, meeting the love of your life and refusing to back to the grey puritans. You’d go spiralling past the Salem Witch trials, through the ash and soot, cascading past the Revolution – no one in my family noticed Paul Revere’s midnight ride, or which lamp was shining from the Tower, they were busy making the shopping lists.

If you go piling through my family history you will meet many dead women, like cod in the hold of a fishing boat, you have to search to find a live one. The only live one was Mary the Puritan who got kidnapped by the Mohawks and refused to go ever go back – can you blame her? – and lived happily ever after. If you cross the ocean around the time of 1690 and arrive into the filthy streets of England and then pop over to Wales, and then cross the sea to Ireland and if you push back further still through the grey mists of times, you’ll eventually meet a great grandmother times infinity and she is alive.

She lives in round hut made of stone with a thatched roof overlooking a small harbor. In the evening she sings to the seals that feed and sun themselves in the area. Her hair was black but now turned silver like the spittle the moon leaves on the rocks and sea. Her eyes are two darts and she speaks to crows. She pours out heather honey as an offering to someone we no longer know. There is no story she doesn’t know and

her fingers are brittle. Her face is as wrinkled as the inside of a closed palm. I went to meet her one evening on a night when the wind howled like a banshee and it was hard to imagine a world without rain. There were no lights at sea or above, but rather a charcoal expanse. She welcomed me in and I sat. She didn’t say anything. Only looked up and nodded ever so slightly. A fire in the centre of the space was neither blazing nor dying and was almost merry as it flickered and danced, encircled in grey stone with specks in them that glimmered in the orange glow. She handed me an ointment and gestured to the scratches and bruises on my legs where I bit and scratched myself the last time I tried to write.

I sat for a long while watching the flame make shapes on the walls of people moving and dancing, having conversation and laughing. I watched generations of shadows move. The old woman and I said nothing. But neither of us seemed disappointed or unfulfilled. When she did speak, it was more a wailing hum than human words.

I stayed with her for what felt like many days, eating barely and bread with honey. We followed her collecting wild herbs to cure her tooth aches and to make more ointments for my scratches. In evenings sometime we took a boat out to past the edge of the harbor. We’d rest there, rocking on the swells, bobbing like an infant on a great knee.

Eventually, they came from beneath us. First the water turned white and churned and then their massive grey bodies were made visible. Out there my grandmother x infinite taught me the songs of the humpback. Night came in and the moon made her mark and we sang with the choir of humpbacks. Why did she teach me this song? Because everyone knows that without the whale song the world would fall apart…

Eventually, I went back, sailing over the ocean, West with time. Through the revolution and patted Mary the Puritan Who Go Kidnapped by the Mohawks and Never Went Back on the shoulder, and into the Saint Louis World Fair and then ran through codfish brains, to now. Where my mother is wishing she didn’t have to clean the house, and my grandmother is eating a tray of fudge. And I think that maybe I’ll write and maybe I’ll do it with out killing myself this time. Maybe my grandmother and mother will waltz around taking turns dying at each other’s hand, but maybe as it turns out their deaths are my Whale Song.

COMMENTARY

In this piece I explore issues of identity, authenticity specifically within women and existential questions of power and truth within that identity. I took a risk with this piece. I began this the story with a seemingly very straight forward and realistic narrative and voice. The story also seems very linear and autobiographical, enabling the reader to take the story for face value; almost following the tone of an essay. As the piece continues, there’s a break and it become magic realism, no longer based in a linear structure. I was inspired 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and how the seemingly concrete becomes watery, instantly.

Furthermore much like Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, two worlds are presented within this piece. Where Yann uses religion and spirituality, I have used matriarchal bitterness and the subversion of motherhood. I intended to create polarity between the first and second halves of the piece; a gritty realism in the first that lingers on the sub verse and explores the dark ingredients that are used to create twisted and resented bonds, the true bonds of family and DNA. And here lies the crisis of dilemma as a game of one-up-woman-ship: ‘On May 10th my grandmother and my mother delivered two of their most lethal blows to each other. My mother’s by being born and my grandmother’s by birthing her at the Salvation Army Hospital for Unwed Mothers and leaving her there.’ The theme of identity in the first part of the piece is distilled cruelly in factual name giving, only ‘mother’ and ‘grandmother’ are used. Identity is rather formed in this piece through the similarity of rage and inability to cope in self. One might make an observation that the dish throwing, the iPhone breaking or self harming is the common language, identifying them as the same blood.

In the second half of my piece I was very inspired by Women Who Run with Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes. In the book Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes uses myth and fairytale from across cultures to explore the idea and archetype of the Wild Woman, who is at the source of life, and the wielder of the life / death creative circle. According to the book, it is she that we women (men) must be in touch with to be truly creative and authentic. That is who the narrator in the story goes back in time to find and relearn how to function by looking at the world in a non- literal, non-language based way.

I wanted to make a comment on the fantastical as being as valid as the “real,” the ‘sea grass and codfish brains’ as being as part of this characters make up as ‘throwing the iPhone out the window and declaring literal or figurative bankruptcy.’ In the second part of the piece, the journey to find the Grandmother x Infinite with silver hair like ‘the spittle the moon leaves on the rocks and the sea’ is one of introspection. Here, I use introspective narration to find an inner piece that is vacant in the first part. The first part observes a grandmother whose own inward rage causes flights of intense pain and anxiety, and who is cut off from her wild self, and at odds with her own existence. Here, I was inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit and how the characters were stuck in this dynamic plagued by their own identities. The play itself, as the title would suggest, offer no way out. But in my story, I wanted to offer another option, a way of healing the conflict of shame and struggle with their own existence. For me, in this story, that way out as expressed in going back to the beginning, to a time before a “power over” society and the meaning of identity and self then.

The identity that is found through a different kind of female relationship and perspective is one that is helpful and peaceful and Wild. One that puts back together the broken pieces of the self. Here I question the integrity of the literal familial inheritance, and explore the depths of a spiritual inheritance and relationship to Earth. Maybe, there is more validity within that realm than the one that we inhabit, and provides us with a solace that carves our own Whale Song.