258 pages, Evolved Publishing
Review by Bill Kirton
I’ve been waiting for this to appear and it
was worth the wait. It’s a thoughtful, excellent, well-constructed read which
deals with important issues in both personal and public dimensions.
It starts at the individual level, narrated
by the Hannah of the title. The author is careful to keep the register
consistent with the phraseology, vocabulary and perceptions of the then six
year old Hannah but still manages to suggest the many things bubbling beneath
the surface which will surface later and contribute to the book’s expansion
into a broader commentary on religious and socio-political manners.
Hannah stops speaking when she’s six years
old. It’s perhaps an extreme reaction to the situation in which she finds
herself and yet the author sketches the circumstances that lead up to it in a
way that makes it understandable, even inevitable. The figure of Hannah is
attractive, sympathetic and quickly establishes a sort of pact with the reader.
She maintains her mutism for the next twelve years but, in spite of her calm
reasonableness, its divisive impact is felt in her family, the local community,
and eventually throughout the USA
When a young child is suddenly ‘struck dumb’,
it encourages speculation in many areas. In this case, occurring as it does in
a society of believers and churchgoers, the tendency may be to see it,
perversely in each case, as the work of the devil or a message from God.
Equally, there will be those who assume some abusive trauma is to blame and
start enquiring into family relationships. Then, when events draw it to the
attention of a wider public, theories will increase exponentially and the
furore will escalate way beyond its original source. And the result is that
questions are asked of the child and the young woman she becomes which bear no
relation to her own inner truth and which increase her determination to remain
cut off from their world and their words.
The series of events which lead to Hannah’s
decision to stop speaking is handled with tenderness and a clear understanding
of how a child’s mind works. She’s a good girl, with a simple faith which
sanitises death by seeing it as moving from ‘here’ to stay with Jesus and the
angels. She tells the truth and is bewildered when adults ask her the same
question over and over when she’s already given them her answer. Her dead
Daddy, whom she loved so much, told her to ‘always listen to people’s words
very carefully to make sure [she] knew what they really meant’. So when the
headmaster, with his own agenda and preconceptions, asks the same question
repeatedly, giving her several chances ‘to tell the truth’, it disorientates
her because that’s exactly what she’s been doing. For her, as for most
children, words mean what they say; sub-texts and coded messages don’t exist.
When her Daddy sang Amazing Grace to
her at bedtime, rather than calm her, its effect was to make her ‘lie there
awake for hours, worrying about getting lost or going blind’.
Without labouring the point, the author
offers plenty of examples of the miscommunication that’s behind her mutism. As
well as the headmaster and her own mother, there’s the counsellor who’s seeking
confirmation of her own belief that Hannah’s been abused and the fire
investigator who believes the blaze was started by Hannah’s friend Daniel and
who ‘asked five or six different times, in five or six different ways, about
where Daniel was and what time it was when we heard the loud pop’. All these
questions are meaningless.
In such a context, the exchange that was
the main reason for her decision to be silent, has a very sophisticated irony.
It happened at Sunday school. Hannah had prepared the lesson and read her Bible
and she had a question. The teacher, the lesson and the picture all showed
Jonah being swallowed by a whale. ‘But’, says Hannah, ‘the Bible says it was a
great fish. Whales are mammals, not fish. Did the Bible make a mistake?’ It’s
an eminently sensible, fair question and yet it provokes a kind of panic in the
teacher, which is then exacerbated by a hilarious set of exchanges between the
other pupils, which ends in the exclamation ‘You’re a dick’. But it’s the teacher’s version of the episode,
which she recounts later, that turns it into a chilling harbinger of the strife
and violence that’s to come. According to her, Hannah had ‘completely destroyed
the impact of the lesson on those impressionable minds’. ‘No telling how many
little souls were forever lost because of her,’ she said. The enormous gap
between the reality of the event and its assumed impact is grotesque.
Before getting to the later stages of Hannah's Voice, there are two more interrelated themes to note. Hannah’s mother is
clearly not quite normal and lots of her quirkiness is manifest in her
attitudes to dirt – both literally and in terms of its symbolism. She liked
things clean. ‘We had to clean the house after we finished the dishes,’ says
Hannah. ‘After I cleaned my room, I dusted the living room and scrubbed the
bathroom sink and toilet. Momma liked the bathroom so clean no one would ever
know we S H I T in there.’ The spelling of the ‘dirty’ word is to avoid her
actually saying it – even in writing. When the children had their post-Jonah
exchange, the teacher called it ‘trash talk’ and, on the occasions when Hannah
unknowingly used a forbidden word, she had to wash her mouth out with soap.
Even lies qualified for the same treatment. Although Hannah never told any, she
was still told to ‘go brush those nasty little teeth before that lie sticks to
them and they rot out of your head’. These are frightening, terrible images to
put into a child’s mind.
And the obsession with dirt is cleverly
used by the author to highlight the workings of the book’s morality. According
to Hannah’s mother, the school has accused her daughter unjustly of various
misdemeanours so, when the two of them leave the school, they shake the dust
from their feet ‘just like Jesus commanded his disciples to do when they left a
village of unrepentant sinners’, an action given a subtle twist later when,
after some violent exchanges between opposing factions in church, Hannah says ‘as
soon as we hit the sidewalk, I shook the dust off my feet’. The morality being
discussed is far from straightforward.
The vocabulary of good and bad is reflected,
too, in that of colour. Hannah’s hair is ‘dirty blonde’. It’s muddy outside the
school. A girl who fell, banged her head and died while skipping got mud in her
hair. Hannah says later that her ‘empty desk whispered to me. Cherubim.
Seraphim. Paradise . Suffer. Resurrection’,
while the empty desk of an enemy of Hannah’s ‘creaked and groaned lie after lie’,
causing Hannah to write on her tablet "Beelzebub. Jezebel. Lucifer.
Brimstone. Torment. Gnash. Chaff." Significantly though, her own desk
‘remained silent’.
So, at the centre of the book is the fact
that Hannah won’t speak because she knows what she says will be misinterpreted
or not believed. The value of words is questioned and yet the huge paradox is
that, because of her silence and her ‘difference’, rival factions arise which,
along with counsellors, media people and others, all desire nothing but words
from her – words which they’re convinced will reveal truths.
There’s irony, too, in the nature and
inspiration of the rival factions. One believes her to be carrying a message
from God which she’ll reveal in His own good time while another sees her as the
spawn of the devil and wants to destroy her. Both base their ‘faith’ not on
anything specific that she said but on two sketches she drew – one angelic, the
other evil. Then there’s a group of anarchists whose leader was inspired to
form a movement when she saw Hannah interviewed on TV, morphed her into a
victim of society with courage but no voice and, as she said, ‘that’s when I
realised I had words’ so she formed Voices
for the Voiceless.
So Hannah’s decision as a six year old has
brought her to oppression by religious and social fanaticism, the intrusions of
politicians and an FBI investigation. And yet all she wants is to find her mum
and be the normal young woman we know she is.
There are other themes, other uses of
imagery which thread through the book, all contributing to and illuminating its
complexity. The author handles them all with assurance and an apparent
artlessness, maintaining it as the story of one young girl and yet, at the same
time, offering a profound analysis of some of the energies, good and bad, which
drive Western and especially American culture.
In the beginning may have been the Word but
problems began when it was interpreted.
Among the many other paradoxes with which Grindstaff
plays is the power and yet potential unreliability of language. Words are so
easily misunderstood or distorted to fit preconceptions. In the end it comes
down to ‘there’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’, all
encapsulated and simultaneously refuted by the glorious use of the word
‘Pancakes’ and a ‘dirty’ word as Hannah eventually breaks her silence.
‘Pancakes. I said I want the goddam
pancakes.’
It’s a book to read for pleasure but also
for enlightenment.
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