The longer you live, the more you understand the importance of The Place Where It Happened, whether it’s the best thing that ever happened to you, or the worst. I started staging my own re-visitings young, even as an eleven-year-old child, looking back at my elementary school playground with a world-weariness more appropriate to someone in middle age. Over the years, I’ve re-visited the sites of breakups, apartments and rooms where many emotional growing pains occurred, or just the park I was sitting in when I talked to someone important for the first time. It all happened right there, I would think to myself, as though the very physical matter of the place held a special charge.
It’s a particular sort of attachment we have as humans, one which is explored with great sensitivity and intelligence in Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi’s novel, Savage Tongues. Whether it’s us doing the attaching, or the place attaching to us, is in some ways the novel’s central question. Can the narrator, who was in an abusive relationship at the young age of seventeen, free herself from the snares of memory and reclaim The Place Where It Happened? Using a simple, straightforward travel narrative as its base, the beautifully nuanced novel traces Arezu’s journey back to the infamous apartment in Spain, where she stays for several weeks with her best friend as moral support. This narrative structure proves to be an excellent scaffolding for the onslaught of sensations and memory that assault (pun intended) Arezu as she travels forward in place but backward in time.
It’s a thrill to read a narrator so viscerally and electrically connected to her own feelings and thoughts; the inner drama which unfolds is as vast as it is filled-in with images, recalled lines of dialogue, and perhaps most importantly, sense-memory. The physical sensations involved in this re-visiting and remembering constitute a narrative in themselves, and Van Der Vliet Oloomi pays them the dutiful attention of an investigative journalist, exposing the nature of trauma and the multi-dimensionality of relationships.
What this novel reveals is that the narrative of place and trauma is one of revisiting and re-envisioning.
There are multiple steps involved in the re-visiting process. The memory of the first time we were there, when we originally went through the event, creates the first layer, upon which years of experience have sedimented. This first-layer memory, like many first impressions, already contains a whole system of components and distorting factors. As Arezu explains:
“It had taken me twenty years to understand that the lens through which Omar had seen me was so wretched, so disgraceful, so disenfranchising, it had robbed me of my ability to see in return: I had lost the power to look. And because I had lost my ability to look, I had lost the ability to see myself clearly. Where then would I speak from? How would I retell my story? I had lost my descriptive capacities. He had reshaped my identity in his image, with his gaze.” (6)
Arezu must re-envision her experience of the event, this time without the abuser’s gaze dominating. Omar’s gaze is still present for the older Arezu, of course, but it has been folded into the mix of time and memory. Meanwhile, to acknowledge even more complexity, the idea of Omar’s gaze has become a new wrinkle in the new re-envisioning, a concept which Arezu could not be conscious of the first time she experienced the event.
While the seventeen-year-old may have been at least partly a blank slate onto which Omar was able to project his perspectives and emotions, the thirty-something Arezu is not. The older self catches up to the younger self in time, each adjusting in order to come to some sort of fundamental agreement. The guilt or complicity of the seventeen-year-old Arezu comes into question, as the nuanced vision of an older woman gives dimensions to the simpler, younger perspective. The novel creates this multiplicity of selves with effective use of imagery and symbolism (most memorably involving a young pig which was killed carelessly by Omar).
In this way, the sensation of moving forward and backward in time results: not only is one’s current self reaching back in time, but the past self is brought forward, into the current emotional moment. This effect highlights exactly how, when it comes to The Place Where It Happened, the sense of place warps time, in multiple directions. This constantly shifting field of events and places and the various perspectives they create calling to each other across time could be argued to constitute the real self, which, if we are aware of it, might give us some tiny modicum of choice over how we exist as selves. To return to the Place Where It Happened, to see with your own eyes, layering the previous perspectives with the current one: this is the defense, as Arezu says, against the self-obliterating effect of the world and its language.
paradoxography 