Every now and then I peruse the 'best sellers' at real bookshops, rather than the virtual one named after a race of she-warriors, from which I buy most of my stuff. Sometimes I even buy - especially when there is a 3 for 2 offer on. What strikes me more and more, is how much autobiography there is written by unknown writers using pseudonymns to protect both guilty and innocent, and relating, often quite graphically, horrendous tales of abuse and suffering. Yestersay I purchased and read two such offerings. One was by a British-Asian woman who wrote with incredible honesty about her experience of forced marriage and honour codes, and how she now works to provide specialist support for Asian women. The other was by a foster carer telling the story of a child who had been systematically physically and sexually abused by a whole network of people and is now permanently injured.
What is almost as scary as the stories themselves is (a) the quantity of them out there - despite our facade of being a civilised nation so many people suffer horrendously, often in silence (b) the fact that these stories become almost reduced to entertainment - something we read in our spare time. There were moments when I felt 'I shouldn't be reading this, it is too voyeuristic' - can I justify reading about someone else's pain? Is it even right that such stories are published and sold? Yet what if they aren't? What if the trauma of 15 year old girls packed off to Asia during school holidays to be married is never heard? What if people never hear the voice of 'Jodie' whose personality has disintegrated following her life of molestation? What about the unheard voices of other characters in the story? The Asian parents who honestly believe they are doing their best or the incompetent social worker who perhaps has a whole raft of her own issues that she cannot share?
I find myself with loads of questions and no answers. I realise just what a collossal social history is being generated by these authors, what a complex 'web of significance' is being generated for future generations to try to unravel when they try to understand anything about 'us.' One of the serious books I read recently said something like 'it is less important that what people recall is accurate than why they recall it, what it says about their understanding of what has happened.' The next step on from that though, is what then happens by the hearer/reader as he/she tries to make something of it.
Just maybe the plethora of writing on such topics as have been described will break the taboos and enable cycles of violence to be broken. Just maybe someone caught up in webs of destruction will be set free. Just maybe in a hundred years' time someone will be able to look back and say 'these stories were awful and people who read them were forced to examine their own motives for so doing, but now, look how much good has been achieved because people both wrote and read them.' I certainly hope they might.