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Category: secrets

  • Editorial: secrets

    Editorial: secrets

    In my misspent youth, I read a detective novel set in the later Roman Empire, where the detective solves a crime by discovering a secret means of communication: someone, I forget who, or why, scratches messages into the wooden shells of the wax tablets used for note taking. With the wax melted back into place, the messages are undetectable. A secret hidden in plain sight, so to speak. A message underneath the message. A different form of palimpsest. I loved it.

    The idea that we are surrounded by secret undercurrents that shape our interactions is appealing and depressing in an equal fashion. Appealing because there are mysteries to be uncovered, intimacies to be shared. Depressing because there are unspoken forces that can shape and ruin lives. In this issue of PEN Transmissions, four writers look at both types of secrets. Margarita García Robayo remembers the secret and secretive nature of sex when she was growing up in conservative Carribean Colombia. Jaap Robben investigates secrets and boundaries: the unspoken agreements between us, and what happens when we renege on them. Sarvat Hasin reflects on the different types of secrets that texts hold, conscious or unconscious, ‘like teeth hidden in a close-mouthed smile’. And Eley Williams shares a specific secret with us. I won’t spoil it for you.

    The Roman wax tablets, by the way, are real, and the messages on them are as well. When I grew older, I realised that, while the detective elements were certainly invented, the scratched remains of messages once hidden underneath layers of wax are really there. They hold a different type of secret, one that is much more precious to me now: a clue to figuring out how people in the past interacted, their ephemeral, throwaway notes made visible.

    I hope you enjoy this issue of PEN Transmissions. Is it secret? Is it safe?

    – Theodora Danek, Writers in Translation Programme Manager, English PEN

  • Secrets and boundaries

    When do you know that you’ve crossed a personal boundary? Jaap Robben, author of You Have Me To Love, a novel about inching closer and closer to the boundary, tries to find out.

    I need a volunteer for this experiment – you.

    ‘Thanks for helping me out. Go stand over there.’

    ‘Like this?’ you ask.

    I nod. ‘Perfect.’

    You’re now three meters away from me, and I ask if I can point at you. You answer ‘yes’. Pointing doesn’t hurt, and you assume it’s part of the experiment. Both of us look at my finger. ‘Is it okay if I point at you like this?’

    You shrug. It feels a bit uncomfortable, but it’s okay. I bring my finger a little closer, let’s say about twenty centimetres closer. That shouldn’t matter for you, right? And after a few minutes, just when you’re not looking, I move a little closer still. And then I move a tiny bit closer again.

    You don’t notice.

    ‘Can I move a little closer?’ I ask.

    ‘Uhm, yeah.’ You nod half-heartedly.

    We are now two meters away from one another. We have time. I keep moving a little closer. Until I’m standing one meter away from you. And just when you start to feel uncomfortable, I ask: ‘Does it hurt, does this bother you?’

    ‘Hurt? No. It‘s a little strange, but…’

    ‘—Can I move closer?’

    ‘Uhm, sure,’ you say.

    With unnoticeably small steps, I move closer to your eye. And closer still. So close that you feel my fingertip touch your eyelash. ‘Is it okay if I go just a little bit closer?’

    ‘Uhm yeah, I’m not really enjoying this.’ Your head moves back a little, but you’re against the wall.

    Then I touch your eye.

    I press gently.

    ‘Ow,’ you say, and push me away.

    Thanks for volunteering, you said exactly the right words. You can sit down now.

    When writing my novel You Have Me to Love, I kept thinking of this experiment.

    Most people grow up within a large social context. As a child, you visit other children. You notice how some fathers acknowledge you when you enter their house, whereas others refuse to look up from their newspaper. How sometimes you feel like your presence is too much. How some fathers play football. How some friends have angry brothers whose rooms are off limits, and others play with their brothers like they are best friends. This wider social context teaches you how to relate to others. What you think is normal might be very strange to others. You emulate certain behaviours. When you become a teenager, you start to compare yourself even more. Slowly, you start to develop your own values. To discover your boundaries.

    In You Have Me to Love, Mikael Hammerman is nine years old in the first part, and 15 in the second. He lives on a remote island between Scotland and Norway. His only social context is his mother, the mail boat, which visits once every two weeks,and a singular neighbour who only cares about Mikael because he has designs on Mikael’s mother. And a group of seagulls.

    Because of this remoteness, Mikael has complete trust in his mother – she unintentionally sets the values and boundaries for social interaction. And Mikael accepts these. Throughout the book, she moves closer to him, millimetre by millimetre. So slowly you can’t point it out. So slowly she doesn’t even notice it. But over the course of several years, Mikael starts feeling it. Even if he is not able to pinpoint exactly what’s happened. It’s a kind of coming closer that is irreversible and, just like in the experiment, he accepts it. Mikael tries to avoid his mother. He tries to get a feel for how close he can get to her, or to what extent he can avoid her. She has no bad intentions but keeps moving a little closer. She drinks from his glass of water, goes to the toilet while Mikael is in the shower. She tries out his father’s sweaters on Mikael.

    Until, just like in the experiment, she touches his eye. At that moment, Mikael knows with absolute certainty that this is too close. This boundary is different for everybody. And sometimes you don’t discover where yours lies until someone’s crossed it.

    Jaap Robben is a Dutch poet, novelist, playwright and performer. Author of several highly praised children’s books, You Have Me to Love (translated by David Doherty) is his first novel for adults. It has received great critical acclaim in the Netherlands and was awarded the Dioraphte Prize and the ANV Debut Prize.

  • How, Telling

    Eley Williams wants to tell you a secret.

    Let me share a secret with you.

    (This parenthetical aside is not the secret [timing is everything] but rather an observation regarding secrets. Do you lean forward or set your shoulders when a secret is being shared? In my experience both the teller and the told tend to shift and adopt new postures as if vying to seem poised enough to handle the secret as well as passive enough to receive it and keep it safe. Eyes widen in order to let more light in.)

    (You will never know my best-kept secret. I’m almost certain that it is not shareable  — you can’t push your thumbs into it and hand out its segments. If I imagine telling that secret it burrows deeper into my body and its edges become momentarily sharper. What happens to my body when I imagine telling my best-kept secret is the reason the word pang exists, I think — the strain of keeping the secret and the pang of the secret itself causes a series of constrictions, contractions and twists in my chest. This implies that I ‘keep’ the secret in an actual location wormed deep into muscle beside my heart. You would have thought it would be lodged in the brain, avocado-stone hidden in the soft fibre between my ears but, ah!, eughhhh, it’s undeniably just behind my lungs and the base of my throat. It is somehow connected to the clenching muscles around my jaw and the ones that control the balling motion of my fists.)

    (I do not examine this best-kept secret often because it makes me wince and, as with the keeping of old books, rare flowers, axolotls etc, I worry what exposure might do to it although I know it will not fray or grow brittle, friable. I can’t imagine its electrical charge will lessen. When I do imagine turning it over to check its lustre or condition, or to see if it is still there, I am reminded that I have instinctively created the perfect conditions for it to thrive: a searing heat and bitter chill felt simultaneously the second I got near it. For this reason I do not consider my best-kept secret often. Maybe it has grown since I last looked, sprouted or swollen or changed its shape. I’m keeping it for myself and for someone else. Maybe it keeps me rather than the other way around.

    In the dead of night I wonder how often a secret’s host host can become its hostage, one’s secreted, secreting guest a draining parasite.

    Maybe my best-kept secret has grafted into my heart and exists not as a small flat nick or patch or thorn niggling into my core but is now part of my very structure  — I can’t give it up any more than I can give up a scordatura of nervous breath or the pace of a quickened pulse.)

    (To get to my best-kept secret you would have to push your hands or chosen tools right through my ribs and cause only the negative sorts of compromise. Its release would be the release of implosions or detonations or aerobullosis, not that of confetti or doves into the air. My best-kept secret lurks in all manner of mixed metaphors and has no time for stage-whispers’ cupped hands nor parentheses. I guard that secret to the extent I am that secret. It cannot be shared, unless rending is sharing. That secret is almost too much to bear but will never be borne from me.)

    The best thing about secrets and the worst thing about secrets is the anticipation of their being shared.

    The worst thing about me is timing and fear of underwhelming an audience. I don’t want to give you false hope so let me say far too late that the secret I’ll share with you is not a particularly interesting one — it’s not tasty (secrets as picnics) and not all that juicy nor meaty (secrets as fruit, secrets as brawn). It’s certainly not top (secrets as shelving or musical notes) and not deep nor dark (secrets as wells and nights, secrets as pretentious coffee flavour descriptors).

    So here’s my bland, dry, gristled, wonky twang of a shallow, flatteringly-lit secret. Concerning secrets, there is a word that I hold particularly dear to me and that I have never said aloud, not to one living soul. That word is

     

     

    not to do with my worst quality, which really is timing. The secret secret-word is zzxjoanw.

    Zzxjoanw! Just look at it! What a thing. You might think I just punched my keyboard and hoped for the best. As a word it has chutzpah and fairly zhuzhes along on the page. (Who knows how to spell zhuzh ‘correctly’? Its origins are spoken rather than scripted, received mouth to mouth as part of the code-cant-argot of Polari. Never forget that there is safety in shared secrets, safe words and zhuzhes of vocabulary that cannot clearly spell its name). If you could apply phonetics to the slough of letters in zzxjoanw you might imagine it would be something like the warbling purr of a cat pulling its mouth against your hand in a headbutt of affection. I think I might say something ‘zzxjoanw!’ every time I wake myself up with a snore. Imagine facing zzxjoanw as a heartstopping jawbreaker mid-Spelling Bee, or the triumph of seeing it tesselate into order amongst your tiles mid-Scrabble tournament. In many ways, it is a secret word known to an elect few, a whispered ‘Open Sesame!’ or Shibboleth passed amongst a specific cadre. For a number of years the secret of its existence and meaning was a closely-guarded one. It is not an official secret, however. Many see it without realising it is officially unofficially hiding in plain sight, and you can find in many editions of Rupert Hughes’ respected The Musical Guide (reprinted as the Music Lovers’ Encyclopedia). It is, literally, the last word in that alphabetised encyclopaedia.

    Since 1903, zzxjoanw has been listed by Rupert Hughes as the Maori word for a drum, fife or conclusion. Whether an object can be a drum or a fife, quite apart from the same word meaning conclusion, is curious but surely not entirely impossible. The runcible zzxjoanw. Additionally, however, as far as I know the letters Z, X, and J do not exist in the Maori language and there were no other Maori-derived entries within Hughes’ Guide. Odd. It was not until 1967 that writer Philip Cohen questioned the spelling of zzxjoanw, especially in terms of its proposed pronunciation (‘shaw’), and it was judged to be a fictional insertion within the Guide’s text. It was entirely made up. A secret trap-door in the well-worn floor, some lovingly-crafted trompe l’oeil widening a window and giving the false impression of a better view.

    I have let you into a secret, a nod and a wink. Do not trust the dictionaries.

    Secrets as painful, secrets as fun, secrets as dependably impeachable and shakily dependent. Handle them with care and loose them with abandon, I guess, and let them roar-whisper whisper-roar like blood when it beats in the pressed-to-the-wall ear. Let’s get sly and committed, the best secrets say, and with a drum’s juiciest note that is kept well and keening, they sidle up, match your step and confide in the dark intimacy, in the deep divide where there’s no denying it, let’s bide our time and share some nonsense together, just you and me, closer than ever.

    Eley Williams is a writer and lecturer based in Ealing. Her collection of short stories Attrib. And Other Stories (Influx Press) was chosen by Ali Smith as one of the best debut works of fiction published in 2017. Twice short-listed for the White Review Short Story Prize, her works has appeared in the London Review of Books, the White Review, Ambit and the Cambridge Literary Review. She has a pamphlet of poetry titled Frit (Sad Press), and is currently co-editor of fiction at online journal 3:AM Magazine.

  • We grew up fearful and confused

    Margarita García Robayo remembers growing up in an environment where sex was ‘a poker game, trading in favours, a secret key that belonged to us girls’.

    When I was a little girl, everyone around me believed that sex was a sin. I grew up in a conservative Catholic Caribbean environment and I grew up among women: mother, grandmother, aunts, sisters, teachers, classmates. Every one of them, in a very natural and imperceptible way, was born into a conspiracy aimed at keeping the order of the world unchanged: that girls were to be kept hidden away in their homes, while boys ran around willy-nilly, chasing after a ball or climbing trees like wild monkeys. Those of us who dared to subvert this decree were stigmatised as ‘tomboys’ and called to modesty with vicious pinches.

    Adult men were distant beings who floated slightly above the ground, speaking in a primitive – and generally malign – language which it was best to ignore. Until you were seven, maybe eight, the masculine figure represented that dark and silent authority that the older women took care to instill in our fertile young heads.

    We were not allowed to get too close to men. They weren’t to be trusted. We weren’t supposed to show them even a glimpse of our naked skin because – due to God knows what strange kind of anomaly – they could react like beasts and gobble you up in one mouthful.

    After a certain age, the threat was expressed in the form of efficient euphemisms. ‘A man is a man’, our mothers would declare, in a tone that was both mournful and threatening, to which we were supposed to ascribe multiple meanings, all of them dubious and dangerous. What did this phrase mean exactly? And how to find out, when the point of a euphemism is that it needs no explanation?

    I was always amazed by how deeply aware the female population was about the lack of evolution – in intellectual terms – of their male counterparts. I would hear my mother and aunts whisper about men with a certain condescension, and about women with unwarranted poison: ‘If she offers herself to him, poor soul has to react’. Men were weak-willed beings with no capacity for judgement who, when faced with the smallest provocation, would display their claws, lash out blows and bury their lethal fangs. Poor souls. It was best not to provoke them.

    Under these circumstances, it was very hard to build healthy, honest relationships with someone from the opposite sex. It was like imagining that a tame pet could befriend a famished predator. As a result, we girls waged constant inner battles. If you liked a boy, a loud mental warning would dissuade you from talking to him. We grew up amid contradiction.

    We grew up fearful and confused. But we grew up and, among other things, growing up means gaining independence. As you do that, you begin to write your own story that eventually superimposes itself on the one of your upbringing.

    For years – and in some cases, forever – that superimposition only happens within you. We were weaving together our individuality with scraps of intimate secrets as innocent as they were unspeakable. And yet, outside us, the official story kept on being replicated: ‘Watch out: a man is a man’.

    Those mixed messages from childhood continued in our teenage years, and they would also come from women, but not the kind we knew. These were women who were part of certain circles, equally hypocritical, but a lot more cynical. I remember the cousin of a friend – a girl older than us who lived in another city – giving us a lesson one afternoon. We locked ourselves up in my friend’s bedroom, still wearing our school uniforms, and listened to her with religious attention: ‘You have to get close, show a little but not too much, allow them to touch you, but never give anything away.’ Or: ‘You have to leave them wanting more, let them crawl to you and beg you for more.’ Beyond leading them on in this way, we had to remember the most important thing: always demand something in return. ‘Something’, in my Caribbean adolescence, could go from a teddy bear to a handbag to sailing to a private island with all your girlfriends. Ah, right, so this was what sex was about: a poker game, trading in favours, a secret key that belonged to us girls. ‘Sounds difficult’, I said to my friend that afternoon once her cousin had gone, leaving us in perplexity, lying on her bed, staring at a constellation of doubts on the ceiling.

    Men’s role seemed a lot simpler. United in their inability to control their own instincts, they were limited to merely reacting. They were there, without having to move a finger: expectant, waiting. Whereas we girls had to cautiously approach them, quietly tame them, constantly measuring our limitations, being careful to provoke them just the right amount, careful not to give too much away. In the sum of those strategic decisions lay the secret wisdom of our female gender.

    They say that what is planted in a child’s mind grows strong and deep roots that are hard to dig up. I could never think of sex as a key that would bring me benefits because I was basically consumed by guilt all the time. Even when as an adult I was able to enjoy a normal, uncomplicated sex life, there was always a tiny part of me that would feel like there was something not right in that exchange. Is he taking advantage of me? Is he going to think I’m too easy? Is he like this with all the others? I would ask myself all of those questions which, in today’s light, I find absurd but also humiliating. Why think of myself as a cherry that, if bitten and abandoned, will rot away? Because of a flaw in my childhood, obviously.

    The worst thing was realising that among my female friends we would still, in one way or another, lie to each other.

    What you did with your boyfriend was always more than you dared confess to others. There was a part of the story that you had to leave out because of fear or shame but, above all, because you’d rather lose an eye than lose your reputation. What if in the end, just like we’d always been told, that was actually the most valuable thing we possessed?

    I truly believe in making radical – albeit always painful – changes to our most deeply-rooted ideas. I think it is harder to change behaviours, because many of the behaviours we incorporate are unthinking (they come imbued in those ideas we thought we had eradicated from our minds). For an organism to get rid of the poison in its body, it needs to undergo a kind of dialysis. In my case, the first thing I did was to create some distance, to face that dubious scenario with a different perspective and accept that, however much you hate it, you still carry some of it in you. I accepted also that the outcome of growing up in the midst of coded messages around sex, of learning the art of speaking in euphemisms, lying gracefully and manipulating, was the formation of a hypersensitive awareness to similar behaviours. Even more so when that behaviour comes from within. I don’t allow myself to be self-indulgent. I live with a whip in hand, ready to detect the toxins leftover from my upbringing. I feel I have made some progress as far as I am concerned: I have been able to change. My next ambition is a bit grander. Now that I have children, I aim to change an entire generation. Wish me luck.

    Margarita García Robayo grew up in Colombia and now lives in Buenos Aires. She is the author of three novels, a book of autobiographical essays and several collections of short stories, including Cosas peores (Worse Things), which obtained the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize in 2014. Her books have been published in Latin America as well as in Spain, and have been translated into French, Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew, and Chinese. Fish Soup (translated by Charlotte Combe, Charco Press, 2018), a collection of novellas and short stories, brings her work into English for the first time.

    Translated by Carolina Orloff.

    Margarita will join Sharlene Teo and Sarvat Hasin for an event with English PEN at the Free Word Centre on 30 October. Find out more.

  • The teeth in the texts

    Each text holds a secret, whether intentional or unintentional. Sarvat Hasin investigates and encounters ghost versions and inspirations that shape a text ‘like teeth hidden in a close-mouthed smile’. 

    During a poetry class a few years ago, a teacher said something I haven’t been able to get out of my head. I think of it when I edit, when I read other people’s work and try to understand what I love or hate about it. The best poems, she said, have a secret running through them. She made a motion with her hands, as if the secret was a rivet, the thing holding everything together. I love this idea — that what binds all these thoughts together is something you cannot quite see. Mystery is not just what keeps a plot or a poem moving forward. It holds a text together, an absence that can be felt before it is discerned. To my mind, there are three kinds of secrets in a text: the one the author withholds entirely. The one that is kept from the audience for a time, only to be revealed later. And the last, the kind that the author is sometimes not quite aware of themself.

    The first kind of secret is the one I think my poetry teacher was talking about. The way a secret can hold a piece of writing together, like invisible scaffolding that holds up the building. The omissions are meant to echo, the absences take on meaning: the way not knowing the name of the narrator in Rebecca allows us to merge more fully with her experience of the world. How would we read it if we knew the narrator’s name? Or Tell-Tale Heart? Or Written on the Body?

    These secrets have a reach — everything that happens off the page is still shaping the story, still sculpting it. Most of us keep banks of pages that go deleted, backstories for characters that never appear on the page but inform the way they react to things, their little quirks and personalities. I could build whole manuscripts out of details I’ve cut, the darlings I had to sacrifice for a tighter story. These darlings exist just outside the periphery of what we as readers are allowed to see, small off-camera details that hang in the air.

    Every piece holds the ghosts of itself, the versions it could have become.

    Sometimes, the secret is the thing that gives the plot shape, the turning point reveal that makes an ending satisfying. This is almost impossible to orchestrate without seeming fussy. Secret reveals are usually the domain of murder mysteries and thrillers, difficult to pull off in other genres without seeming like a gimmick, the sort left best to Agatha Christie novels.

    In Annie Baker’s John, a play about a crumbling relationship, and a bed and breakfast with a spooky landlady and an American Girl doll, the secret is the title: it glows under the text of the play but never overwhelms it. The play is never about finding out who John is. Unlike in a thriller, where the reveal is constantly on the reader’s mind, in John, we are barely conscious of where Baker is leading us. There is a textured languorous nature to her work: heroic pauses that linger between the couple, completely unhurried and yet heavy with meaning. They fight and make up and drift apart again, and we are caught up in it so completely that when the reveal happens – the  phone beeping with a text, the word John explaining everything – it is not quite an aha moment, it is the softly satisfying reassurance that the journey we’ve been taken on is now complete, that the gaps in our understanding of the couple’s fights can be filled.

    In a sense all art is based on secrets, on these things hidden behind the curtain. When I read a friend’s novel or poetry, I can sometimes glimpse behind the top layers — see the person in their life who inspired a certain turn of phrase, or the real home that the setting of a scene is based on. It clicks in my head like magic, like a small lamp switching on in the corner of the stage, outside the spotlight. But these secrets are not intentionally withheld. Sometimes, people don’t even know what they are hiding. I look back at the things I’ve written, sometimes months and years after it was first put to page and see it differently.

    I can see the fingerprints of other people, things they said or did shaping the way an idea comes onto the page. Sometimes these have been hidden, even to myself, for a long time.

    Inspiration works this way also, texts hiding their origins in other works. We are all borrowers and thieves. In other people’s work, we find templates for our own. Sometimes these are abundantly obvious, even sales pitches of the books — a retelling of a certain myth or a new version of an old story. Other times it is more insidious, the original hiding behind the new work, like a person standing right behind the other at some distance so you cannot quite see them, or like teeth hidden in a close-mouthed smile.

    What is a secret? A sign of restraint or an excess of something else: plot, tension, ambiguity. The balance of what appears on the page and what doesn’t is in constant play. We might hold the secrets of our own stories but we can never see them quite clearly, never as they are meant to be seen — by someone who is discovering them anew, someone who has not lived with its ghosts.

    Sarvat Hasin was born in London and grew up in Karachi. She is the author of the novel This Wide Night (Penguin India, 2017) and the short story collection You Can’t Go Home Again (Penguin India, 2018). She is the fiction editor of the Stockholm Review.