Lesbian Desire in Picture Claire

One of the most intense classroom moments occurred a few years ago in one of my comp classes when a student, somewhat outspoken and a little older than the rest,  began discussing the reading for that night, an essay somewhat in shaky defense of the Sally Mann photographs.  This student has since become much more than just a former student to me; in fact, I consider her a friend, and I have to think that it was this very moment that our friendship formed. As she continued her analysis, she became more and more animated (and loud).  She became visibly emotional as she discussed the themes of loss of innocence the photographs portrayed, and the reality of childhood vs. its Western Leave-it-to-Beaver childhood mythical counterpart, which some of understand rarely exists, here in the US or there in Bosnia where she grew up. While I understand how real war has a detrimental effect on childhood, sometimes at least it is a faceless enemy while the war at home has the face of your father and sometmes your mother, of which there is no escaping except through growing up, which one must try to do as soon as possible in order to survive.

My student tried to mask her escalating emotions, which were beginning to have an effect on the other students and the overall tone of the classroom.  I was very aware of the effect the text was having on her as she tried to not only intellectualize but sift through her own burgeoning feelings not only because I am the teacher and am trained for moments like these; indeed, I pray for moments like these: witnessing the crossing over of the demarcation line of before and after: moments of revelation and personal and intellectual insight experienced by a student, and the loss of innocence as you realize something about yourself in a public way: this painful reopening of long shut childhood memories of your own triggered by a provocative and controversial photograph of an artist whose favorite and controversial subject was the documenting of the process of puberty of her own children. I would not have missed the emotional reaction elicited by her analysis of the photograph because my own reaction was similar when I first looked at the Mann photographs. Like the children in those pictures, who metaphorize of the loss of childhood innocence I have experienced the premature and forced letting go of childhood innocence, and have been mostly in denial since. Each of us deals with trauma and tragedy in her own way. For me, that meant a complete denial of my own unhappy childhood by creating a new one by extrapolating from happy idyllic family narratives like Little House on the Prairie which I would spend as many unbroken hours as possible reading in the most obscure quiet corner of the nearest empty classroom.  It was, of course, a displacing of abuse, the rhetoric and main discourse of my childhood.  I sometimes wonder how successful that whole attempt was. On the one hand I was able to function as a normal looking normal acting child in sometimes extraordinary ways. I was smart, pretty, athletic, capable and in complete denial. It was only when I hit the teenaged years that the rifts began to show, when I could no longer deny the impact of the pain I had continually experienced throughout my childhood.  I had a mother who was the signifier of both pain and love. While her physical body took most of the brunt of my father's abuse our minds had no choice but to accept the emotional abuse suffered by her as well as by ourselves which was ladled at us sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, and sometimes, in those rare peaceful moments when I could pretend my life was just as normal as anyone else's, not at all.  The irony as an adult of course is that ours was not the only family to suffer. And though I have scaled the class barrier pretty well there is a part of me that will never escape the stigma of my childhood experiences.  Remnants of my unhappy childhood weave themselves in and out of my present life. I look at the relationships I have made and see a reflection of some of the most unhealthy relationships I had as a child. This worries me but at the same time is explicable and so I am not unnerved completely. When I examine my life, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and ask myself why I do some of the things I do, I always know the answer lies somewhere buried in those faceless haunting memories of my childhood. Many years ago, our house was destroyed by a fire and years after that my mother would sometimes become emotional when talking about all the lost childhood pictures of her children.  When I think about it, I am almost glad that I am spared from viewing those faces of my childhood, so that I don't have to confront what I know I will always find-the bittersweet and melancholic smile of a child who understands that she has grown up too quickly, that her circumstances have landed her in the land of adults; she will wake up and no longer be in Oz, because for her, Oz was always a fairy tale first. I really never understood why Dorothy would ever want to go home.

The loss of childhood innocence has its most insidious effect on one's dreams.  When one, like the occupants in Gwendolyn Brooks' “Kitchenette Building”, has such limited access to one's own dream, indeed the color is “grayed in and greying”. This is the tragic legacy of lost innocence: what it can do to your dreams. And the most ironic of all, I became a dreamer and truly believed one day that my destiny would take me away from the meanness of my everyday life. Unlike Eveline in Joyce’s story, I would be whisked away into the loving arms of fate.  And that's how I survived. I was a dreamer or in the very least, my own best personal con artist. Perhaps that’s what confronted my student that day she spoke about Mann’s photographs.  Perhaps she recognized how the loss of innocence can sometimes lead to even greater and maybe better truths about the adult. Insights are rarely achieved without some cost, the putting to rest of the myths of your childhood, or sometimes its painful reality.  This is the bittersweet reconciliation and awakening of the soul of the child with the present adult. There was something highly personal triggered by the photograph of a skinny little girl wearing a nondescript plain white dress, a cigarette dangling from her barely formed lips,  defiantly facing the camera. Whatever it was for her, it triggered in me something as well. And this, we both knew and instantly recognized, was the mutual understanding that can happen to people, sometimes total strangers, who have experienced similar traumas in their lives. Adults are capable of declaring a war on childhood innocence whether it is done intentionally, like my father, or unintentionally, like my mother, who, by making me her confidant made me her conspirator as well, leaving me with no choice but to leave the land of Oz.  I loved my mother, and I even loved my father but if I could change the way I grew up I would. I would take that long train back and alter the trajectory of my childhood; but perhaps that is what I do each time I am confronted by a text and it reads me as much as I do it. When people say they have no regrets I never really believe them because I certainly do. I would have stopped living in a fog in my twenties and tried to live and just simply be, painful memories and all. I would have believed in myself but especially in my own ability to dream. I would have believed in my dreams. They say it is never too late, like the cautious occupants in Kitchenette Building, "we wonder but not too long."