Book review: Traumata, Meera Atkinson (2018)

This memoir seems to have been pre-packaged for the victim industry. It suffers moreover from major problems in the area of pacing, but the problems go deeper than that. They are not merely mechanical, but indeed are structural in nature.

There was a rape when the author was aged 18 and then you are given a potted version of the idea of the patriarchy, as though that answered all of the questions you might have about the issues that are raised. There is a stab at the science behind memory but the author enters very strange territory when she talks about her uncle’s wife, of the Macarthur-Onslow clan. Atkinson recounts a bit of the family’s history and then, completely po-faced, avers that trauma had been ferried across the generations from the Battle of Culloden, which took place in 1746. Now I went to school with a scion of the Macarthur-Onslow family and he was a boy, named Rupert, who was well-adjusted enough despite a slightly odd physiognomy, and who probably ended up in the legal profession, as an alarming number of my schoolmates did. I found myself vocalising aloud at this point and deciding against continuing with the book.

But this kind of literature, which frames reality in terms that only a minority can possibly tolerate, let alone comprehend, seems to be more and more commonplace. Recently I tried reading a book titled ‘Citizen: An American Lyric’ which was published in 2014 and was written by an African-American author named Claudia Rankine. The boosterish title of the book conceals an ironic (possibly) reference to a homeland that had neglected the author and oppressed people looking like her.

But the overall tenor of the project was suffocatingly narrow, because the author’s world is delimited by blatant discrimination on the part of the white majority, on the one hand, and by a blinkered viewpoint on the other that is informed by reading from a collection of black-liberationist source texts. If you don’t accept the underlying premises of the argument, then the story just becomes nonsense. I personally cannot comment with great authority on the American experience, having only visited that country a double-handful of times over the years, but I do know Australia and Atkinson’s restricted version of reality is not reflective of the country I live in.

I have worked for most of my life in various office jobs starting from when I left a sales position with Pan Books to join the public service. I had women managers in 1988 for a year when I worked with the police, and from 1992 until 1997 when I worked at a Japanese manufacturing company in a PR role, then I worked as a technical writer under a woman in 2008 at Sydney University. The women I worked under were no worse and no better than any man I have worked under, except the last, who was a downright bully. Working in her office I practically had a nervous breakdown, her conduct was so deplorable. So I don’t accept that a society run by women would be any better or any worse than one run by men.

But the left is irrational and won’t see reality if you hold it up in front of their faces. You think that a humiliating defeat on a battlefield remote in time and space still lives today in the hearts of the majority, when it is merely a preoccupation for the looney fringe? How’s this: I was out having a few beers at the Crown Hotel on Elizabeth Street one night and in the smoking area was a man who had rings on his fingers celebrating the name of James Edward Stuart, the son of King Charles II, known as the Old Pretender to the throne of the United Kingdom. He got into an argument with a friend of mine. They were stalemated for a period of time until the hostilities ended and amity was reinstated in that corner of the pub.

I have met Meera Atkinson on one occasion, at meeting a mutual friend organised in Newtown. I mentioned to her, in an attempt to break the ice because it was the first time we had met, that books by Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson were regularly stolen from the bookshop that I used to go to when I lived in Queensland and that the managers of the business had had to place their copies of the authors’ books behind the counter to prevent theft. Atkinson dryly noted that both of the authors I had named had abused alcohol, and left it to me to decide whether it had been wise to bring up their names.