Man Hating Psycho

by Iphgenia Baal

  My initial attempts at trying to find out about The Family were not particularly successful. My mum divulged various titbits in a frustratingly roundabout manner, acting surprised when I claimed to not have been told about her dad being a law professor at Lvov before the war, or her mum being a disc jockey in Paris and a magazine journalist in Oz and at some point ending up in Hollywood. I lapped up everything she said but the thing that stuck with me most from these first exploratory steps into my mum’s family was hearing my mum calling her mum and dad ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’.

  Pulling the same number on my dad, it has to be said, my dad knew shockingly little. He told me his parents had gone to Holland because his mum had TB and the drugs to cure it weren’t available in Suriname at the time (the Fifties, I guess). And about an uncle, his dad’s brother, who had been a sailor and paid for the trip. He said his parents had initially intended to return to Suriname but ending up staying in Holland for the rest of their lives, returning only once, in their eighties. Without much else to say, my dad reminded me of a song that his dad had sung him when he was small and which he’d sung to me and my sisters as babies, ʻKonoe Oloisi Lassieʼ.

  — Konoe oloisi lassi a mi era bogo take-eh, yes bananci, yes a mi take-eh, Yes banaci yes.

  Watching my dad as he sung in his soft, funny accent, hands skiffling from side to side, told me more than any anecdote he could come up with. It was, I thought, like watching a Sam Cooke, or a Nat King Cole from another dimension. A fantasy world in which the English hadn’t traded Paramaribo for New York with the Dutch.

  It took a long time but bit by bit my parents opened up and shared what they knew about their parents with me and my sisters. My mum revealed a suitcase she had full of fake passports and old photos. Going through them told of how her mum had ended up being in Paris at the outbreak of the war after being sent there from Kiev as a little girl for deciding that the ruling Communist party wasn’t Communist enough and distributing flyers at school. She’d been hurried off to the train station by her mother, tipped off by a teacher, before the authorities could get involved. My mum told me about her dad, who didn’t have papers, arriving in Paris and hiding under her mum’s bed for months after the Nazis invaded. But that was easily a decade later and there were no stories from in between. She told me about that her parents travelled together from Paris to Warsaw to rescue my mum’s mum from the Warsaw Ghetto but how they achieved it she didn’t know. She thought they might have lived in the forest outside Warsaw over a winter or two, but that was information got from an old lady in New York, who had been with her mum when she died. This old lady had another story about my mum’s mum being on a train to Auschwitz, of the train stopping, of it being hot, of the prisoners forcing the train door open, of my mum’s mum and one other woman being the only people brave enough to make run for it, of them hiding in a barn, of them being found by the farmer, of the farmer hiding them, then the story is cut short.

  My dad also caught the bug and began extensive emailing with distant family members and an amateur Surinamese anthropologist he found in Canada, using the skills he’d developed in his job to turn up what little info there was. Old addresses in dodgy Paramaribo districts, notorious for prostitutes. A great-grandfather who was a policeman, known for his use of excessive violence. A great-aunt and her mother who died on a leper colony. A lot of writers, journalists mostly, but writers nevertheless. His mother being adopted. Whispers of a rape or violence, a shameful event that hadn’t ever been talked about and no one knew what exactly it was. And the plantation ‘we’ were from, called Rac à Rac, deep in the Surinamese interior.

  I took the things my parents told me and used them to do my own research online, attempting to fill in gaps of which there were far more than there were stories.

  At first, I revelled in each new discovery I made. Stories of one-way boat trips and one-way train rides seemed to explain my obsession with packing. Stories of slave uprisings where slave drivers were killed made my hotheadedness and violent dislike of authority a noble tradition. Stories of distributing print ephemera and unachievable political idealism explained my mode of writing and perverse desire to publish.

  The more I learned about my grandparents and their parents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles, the more I felt love for, and an affinity with, my lost relatives and their kin… But then something funny happened. The love and affinity I felt made me realise that what I was doing was selfish. I was cherry-picking anecdotes I liked the sound of, or felt reflected some aspect of me, which, in actual fact, was a massive betrayal of the very people I claimed to care about and wanted to represent. It was like some distant relative of mine in the future finding out a half-truth about me and instead of trying to understand and empathise, just using it to cudgel other people over the head with.

  The more I learned, the more I cared and the more I cared, the more the uncomfortable reality reared its simple, ugly head. People in chains, people being hunted, people in hiding, people as cargo, cargo thrown overboard halfway across the Atlantic, people in exile, people in bondage. It was a miracle that any of us survived at all! It was, I realised, nothing short of a miracle that I was alive, and not just alive, but alive at the flourishing heart of empire. There was no one chasing me, there was no one coming to kill me, there was no one coming to tie me up and force me into servitude or make me sleep under the stairs or out on the porch or under the bed.

  The uncomfortable conclusion I finally arrived at was that while it is tempting to point the finger and accuse everyone of being racist, the personal horrors my family (or the stand-ins I had to find for them where there were no stories) lived through at the hands of racists and genocidal maniacs, bore little resemblance to my happy-go-lucky life. Sure I’ve been arrested a few times and thrown in a cell, sure I’ve had people ridicule my big lips and my gappy teeth, sure I’ve been homeless, sure I’d been broke, sure I’d never been properly re-numerated for a job, but having to tolerate the bizarre form racism has morphed into in the UK today (where my ancestors probably would’ve liked to get away from the fact that they were black or the fact they were Jewish, I find myself constantly having to persuade people that I’m not of their stocky island descent, that my hands are clean) is nothing compared to the misfortune that characterised my ancestors’ lives.

  What I realised is that the enjoyment I took in romanticising the lives of my parents’ parents and all their parents before them, and the relevance I choose to take from it, was a privilege and like any privilege taken, it left little space for the real tragedy of just how painful and just how unfair these lives had been. Sure, there are echoes, hangovers, hang-ups, inherited trauma where I desperately try and chase sufferation, without being sure why, but how can I, in good faith, stand up and represent on matters I understand so little?

  It’s impossible to know what to say. Violence is wrong? Slavery was bad? The Holocaust shouldn’t have happened? Only there is no alternate dimension, no other happy universe where a Surinameer (which, if slavery hadn’t happened, wouldn’t be a place) and a lapsed Ashkenazi Jew could meet in a revolving door at Manchester University and go on to procreate. Without the Holocaust, without slavery, without violence, without prejudice, without all the shit that all the people in my family went through, there wouldn’t be me. I wouldn’t exist. All there would be instead was a couple of weirdoes rolling round Ukraine or Russia or France or Angola or Sierra Leone or Ghana or The Gambia or Senegal or maybe even Indonesia, who had eyes or a temperament or a physique or preferences or talents or tastes vaguely similar to mine.

  About The Author

  Iphgenia Baal is a writer who lives and works in London. She is the author of several fiction books, including The Hardy Tree (Trolley Books, 2011) and Death & Facebook (We Heard You Like Books, 2017).

  Her unique prose style, once cited as a ‘marrying of politics and ass’, has been likened to writers as varied as James Joyce, Manuel Puig and Dodie Bellamy, and appeared in publications in
cluding AQNB, Nervemeter, Schizm and The White Review, among others.

  Influx Press is an independent publisher based in London, committed to publishing innovative and challenging literature from across the UK and beyond.

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  Copyright

  Published by Influx Press

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  © Iphgenia Baal, 2021

  Copyright of the text rests with the author.

  The right of Iphgenia Baal to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Influx Press.

  First edition 2021. Printed and bound in the UK by TJBooks.

  Paperback ISBN: 9781910312797

  Ebook ISBN: 9781910312803

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  Cover design: Keenan Designs

  Interior design: Vince Haig

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