NOVEL OF THE WEEK
Opaque anonymity Anatomy of a Disappearance Hisham Matar
VIKING, 256PP, £16.99 ■Tablet bookshop price £15.30 Tel 01420 592974
H
isham Matar is adamant that his two published novels should only be read
as fiction. When the lyricism of the writing and the evocation of space, time and character are so powerful, why should the literal truth matter, one way or the other? Yet pursuit of the factual truth is hard to avoid. Both the much-lauded In the Country of Men and this book are obsessed with the same moment in Matar’s own life: when his father, Jaballa Matar, was abducted from his bed one night in 1990. A former Libyan delegate to the United
Nations in New York (where Hisham was born) and a long-standing opponent of
Speaking out
Voices from Silence Mary Craig
VOICES.FROM.SILENCE@
GMAIL.COM;
WWW.VOICESFROMSILENCE.COM, 192PP, £9.99
oices from Silence is the third volume of Mary Craig’s acclaimed memoirs. Like its predecessors, Blessings and The Last Freedom, which recount her search for strength following the birth of two learning-disabled sons, and then her husband’s illness and untimely death, it is a personal odyssey. It makes extraordinary and moving reading, describing the author’s decade-long investigation of a technique known as Facilitated Communication (FC), which enables learning-disabled people to communicate. FC has a complex and controversial
V
history, originating in 1985, when Rosemary Crossley, a training assistant in a Melbourne institution for “severely retarded” children, hit on a therapeutic tool to enable those who lacked even the most elementary skills to express themselves, one that could be applied “right across the ‘retarded’ spectrum: with autistic people, those with Down’s syndrome and others with all manner of developmental disorders – the all-time losers at the bottom of society’s slush pile”. Bruising encounters with scientists and other sceptical medical experts were to follow, establishing a disturbing theme which recurs throughout the book.
FC is indeed a hot potato. But the many recorded witnesses to its liberation of captive minds make reading Voices from Silence an affecting experience. (“I am human now,” typed Erica, using FC, in an
24 | THE TABLET | 25 June 2011
Gaddafi, he had fled Libya for Egypt in 1979. A solitary letter from Abu Salim jail in 1996 reached Jaballa’s family just before a prison massacre of over 1,000 inmates, instigated by the authorities. This, however, is an anatomy, not a
documentation of a disappearance. The title inevitably evokes Anatomy of a Murder, the book by Robert Traver, filmed as a courtroom drama, that turns on the interpretation of available evidence and the different truths told by various witnesses. Just as Traver was writing of a real case in which he was the defence attorney, so Matar is a real son in search of his father. Matar has repeatedly insisted he is presenting an autobiography. But it cannot be enough to omit the name of the country in which it takes place: it
interview with the author, who had asked how FC had changed her life.) Yet Crossley’s actual technique is astoundingly simple, although extremely careful training is required and immense sensitivity necessary. It amounts to the provision of gentle hand/wrist-support, enabling a non-speaking person to type or point, and so express himself, a technique born of the vital recognition that many such people are unable to initiate such movements. The other essential feature seems to be the facilitator’s expectation that the user is a person with something to say. Mary Craig heard about FC from an acquaintance who wrote describing its effect on her 30-year-old son, Thierry, who had always lived in institutions, unable to relate to his family or to speak. Recently he had been moved to a new place where FC was used, and his mother had been invited to attend his first session. The facilitator sat with Thierry and isolated his finger over a small computer; after a few false starts, Thierry began to spell out thoughts and feelings which shocked his mother to the core, revealing that, contrary to all appearances, he led an intensely aware and emotional inner life. Moreover, somehow or other along the way, he had absorbed literacy. Mary Craig could not believe what she was reading. Fifty years of living with her learning-disabled sons had given her ample time for reflection but this was something utterly new. Wonderment was matched by incredulity, but here was a challenge, made personal by her own family history; she had to find out more. This book describes what followed, and her gradual realisation that, for all its troubled history, FC works. It is not a cure, and it raises impossible questions, but it works, giving voices to the voiceless. It may even be, in the words of a former
might as well have been called Erewhon. What is so moving here is Nuri’s narrative voice as he describes the circle of his loved ones, including the extended family of uncles and aunts, servants and professionals and the redoubtable lawyer, Hass. The plot’s tension is heightened when Nuri learns to revise his assumptions about both parents. Inevitably, all relationships are thrown into question, intensifying those between young mother and maid, son and stepmother, even brother and sister. Each emerges as increasingly intricate and indefinite. Each character is delicately dissected, as befits an anatomy, and none more so than the elegantly elusive Mona, Nuri’s stepmother, with whom he has a fatal – or fated - relationship. By the story’s end we learn something of
Nuri’s troubled and profoundly moving life, and much of the country with which we seem to be waging a proxy war. In this work, Libya’s unnamed identity occupies a space at least as large as the silhouette of an unknown parent. Amanda Hopkinson
professor of psychophysiology, Jean-Michel Olivereau, that it offers a new approach, unveiling “a reality beyond the limits of the most recent advances in neuro-sciences … the most important discovery that humanity has made about itself in the second half of the twentieth century”. But the questions are real. How can it be
that learning-disabled people, who experience such terrible difficulty in relating to the challenges of daily living, and are not deemed educable, according to medical tests, seem nonetheless to absorb literacy, just by being alive? Yet that is the contention of this book, for FC cannot work without it. The author herself, during her worldwide peregrinations researching this subject, bears powerful witness to it, over and over again; indeed, she devotes a whole chapter of the book to its working with her own Down’s syndrome son, Nick, an adult who, though he can talk, has never been taught to read, write or spell. Moreover, some of the disabled people who use FC don’t even look at the keyboard; some can’t because they are blind – yet it still works, though it is never a cure. Mary Craig acknowledges all these questions, and believes there is much still left to understand about the workings of the mind. She raises questions herself about the rigidity of “experts” who believe autism is a cognitive disorder, and still apply standardised proof-gathering methods of psychological testing on autistic people, who cannot respond to them. She also knows that FC is only one among many tools used to help learning-disabled people communicate. But she believes in it, because she has seen it work. Using it, many voices speak from the pages of her book. Read it and hear them. Mary Blanche Ridge
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