The Life Writing of Otherness by Rusk Lauren;

Author:Rusk, Lauren;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2002-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A third stage of the voice motif brings together the images of inarticulate girl, wife-prospect, and opera singer in a partial resolution, in the scene of the teenage protagonist’s self-disclosure to her parents. It does not come easily; the girl tries for weeks to express herself, whispering confessions while her mother starches the shirts, until she’s told to shut up. She feels “something alive tearing at my throat, bite by bite, from the inside.” At last, the continual presence of a suitor spurs her to the breaking point. He is a retarded, ape-like older man, who carries cartons to sit on filled with pornographic pictures. Yet her parents silently permit the man’s vigil because he owns a chain of profitable toy stores. Finally, at dinner in the laundry, the girl’s “throat burst open.” Jumping up to confront her parents, she refuses to be fixed up, proclaims that she’s going to college, and blurts out her whole litany of guilty secrets. The girl’s freed tongue also becomes an instrument of collective insurrection. “And you leave my sister alone,” she yells. “You try that with the [matrimonial] advertising again, and I'll take her with me.” The protagonist’s “talking and burbling” resounds in her ears with a “voice like Chinese opera. I could hear the drums and the cymbals and the gongs and brass horns” (233, 236).

Striking out, she takes on the glory of an opera warrior, refusing the role of self-lacerating heroine. In contrast to the singer in the previous scene, the protagonist cries out not to invite injury but “to stop the pain in my throat,” not to submit but to rebel, not to conform as a daughter-in-law but to reveal her individuality: “I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me …” (229). 90

Aspects of this scene of self-revelation seem to comment on the construction of autobiography, by the writer and the audience. The protagonist’s torrent of “true things” is a mixture of concrete and imaginary events from different times “scrambled out of order,” all equally present in the telling. Brave Orchid, the auditor, is analogous to the reader. The confession stirs her to participate in the process of its creation: “She herself was shouting out things I had meant to tell her …” (236).

The climactic incident enables me to gather together previous images having to do with self-disclosure and performance. Moreover, merging the images of the choked-up girl and the opera singer, the tirade recalls yet another earlier passage. This new link allows me to see, in retrospect, that in grade school, the protagonist is psychologically preparing for self-discovery when

My silence was thickest—total—during the three years that I covered my school paintings with black paint. I painted layers of black over houses and flowers and suns…. I was making a stage curtain, and it was the moment before the curtain parted or rose…. I… pretended the curtains were swinging open, flying up, one after another, sunlight underneath, mighty operas. (192)

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