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War and Children

“….. Children should never be caught in the crossfire, and their homes, schools and communities must not become battlefields. Wars have laws. Children and schools must be off limits.” Inger Ashing (CEO of Save the Children International)

“….development demands its own conditions, irrespective of war and peace or all other happenings in the outer world.” From War and Children by Anna Freud & Dorothy T.Burlingham

As I mentioned in the previous post today’s piece is about Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham’s book, War and Children, which is based on their case-history notes drawn from daily contact with a living, war-time laboratory, and their reports that show how they reached their conclusions. Freud and Burlingham’s work is based on the fundamental idea that the care and education of young children should not take second place in wartime, nor should it be reduced to wartime level. They claim that like the lack of essential foods in early childhood will cause lasting bodily malformation in later years, even if the harmful consequences are not immediately apparent, the same is true for the mental development of the child, and whenever essential needs like the need for personal attachment, for emotional stability, and for permanency of educational influence are not fulfilled,“lasting psychological malformations will be the consequence.”

I have accompanied the text with two works by a favourite painter, Eduardos Sakayan, Child and Castaways (1994-1998) and Human Heap or Waiting List (1990-1998), which do not depict scenes of war, but came to my mind as I was wondering what images to choose to accompany today’s text, maybe because I had the pleasure of seeing some of his paintings, along with other artists’ work, at the municipal gallery, and two of my own older images from a mosaic of figures.

Even though this material was written in the 1940s, and despite the more recent findings and knowledge around child development and attachment in the fields of psychology and medicine, Freud and Burlingham’s work is inspiring and their observations and findings remain valuable and important. The book is also a reminder of our humanity and our duty towards the young. Additionally, I feel that this material is highly relevant today, as we have been witnessing conflict and wars around the globe, where civilians have been increasingly targeted, homes, hospitals, schools and desalination plants bombed, and large numbers of children are witnessing destruction, are being killed, amputated, starved, and orphaned.

In 1941, pioneering child psychoanalyst, Anna Freud, and Dorothy Burlingham established three wartime childrens’ homes in response to the air raids on London, for all those children who had lost parents or homes, or those whose mothers had fallen ill or had to bring them to air raid shelthers every night. Freud and Burlingham observed that the break down of families impacted the children more than the actual war experiences, and unlike other homes for children, the Hampstead War Nurseries, placed emphasis on maintaining regular visits from mothers, and other family members when possible, and also on fostering sibling bonds. Along with the care and education of the children, psychoanalytic work and developmental observations, also took place, and these findings were published at the time and are included in this book.

Freud and Burlingham’s goal was to work towards certain main achievements:

to repair the damage already caused by war conditions to the bodily and mental health of children and to prevent further harm being done to the children. Therefore, when babies had to be separated from their mothers efforts were made to keep them in comparative safety within easy reach of their families; to facilitate visiting so that the baby could develop an attachment for and knowledge of its mother and be prepared for a later return to family life, and for older children the necessary provisions were made for ordinary peace-time education, while again trying to preserve the remnants of family attachments as much as possible. Another achievement they strived towards was to do research on the essential psychological needs of children, study their reactions to bombing, destruction and early separation from their families, collect facts about the harmful consequences whenever their essential needs remained unsatisfied, observe the influence of community life at an early age on their development, and finally, to instruct people that were interested in forms of education based on psychological knowledge of the child, and to work out a pattern of nursery life which could serve as a model for peace-time education.

Many interrelated topics are discussed in the book accompanied by study case examples. Inevitably I will briefly touch upon a few. I also need to say that Freud and Burlingham’s conclusions are the result of their observations and work with children, as well as, their psychoanalytical background.

In relation to matters around separation they conclude that the fact that evacuation under the present conditions is as upsetting as bombing itself, is no proof that better methods of evacuation could not be found, which guard the children’s life and bodily health, while at the same time provide the possibility for normal psychological development and steady progress in education. They assert that if separation between the child and the mother happened slowly, and if the people who are meant to substitute for the mother were known to the child beforehand, then transition from one object to the other would proceed gradually. And if additionally the mother reappeared several times during the period when the child had to be weaned from her, although the pain of separation would be repeated, it would be felt in smaller doses each successive time, allowing the child to process and adapt because there would be “no empty period in which the feelings of the child are turned completely inward and, consequently, there would be little loss of developmental achievement because regression occurs when the child is passing through the no-man’s-land of affection, i.e. during the time the old object (person) has been given up and before the new one has been found,” which can do incalculable harm to a child’s normal development. Two poignant examples of the children under their care that had expressed this state of mind in their own words reveal to us the pain and confusion felt by the child. One little boy almost four years old had said: “I don’t like you, I don’t like anybody! I only like myself,” and another five year old boy had exclaimed: “I am nobody’s nothing.”

As I mentioned above Freud and Burlingham observed that although long drawn-out separation may bring more visible pain, it is less harmful because “it gives the child time to accompany the events with his reactions, to work through his own feelings over and over again, to find outward expressions for his state of mind, i.e. to abreact slowly.” They believe that it is important for evacuation to occur in slow stages, to offer mothers who refuse to part from their young children the chance to work as paid domestic staff, to maintain the remnants of the parent relationship, as far as possible, prepare the children for their return to their homes after the war, and also, have little or no restriction of visiting rules. They also add that if babies have to be separated from their mothers, it is best they go to crèches near factories, for instance, where their mothers can leave them in the morning and collect them after work.

They explore the mother-child relationship in the early stages, and how devastating sudden separation can be resulting in long drawn-out states of homesickness, upset and despair, which are certainly more than the average inexperienced foster mother can be expected to cope with. Additionally, separation and lack of visits is understood by children as rewards and punishments. One example that demonstrates the more severe effects of this separation is Beryl, a four year old “who sat for several days on the exact spot where her mother had left her, would not speak, eat or play, and had to be moved around like an automaton.” Freud and Burlingham describe how they had little girls of three and four who would “hang around” the doors for hours on end when their mothers were expected to come, but then during the visits they would be gloomy, shy, and hang onto them without talking. Then when their mothers had left the affection broke through and violent emotional scenes took place.

They discuss how difficult it is to wean the very young child away from its mother, and how it’s just as difficult to try and keep alive in the child remnants of its original relationship to the mother, and parents more generally, because unfortunately children under three will forget about their parents or at least become apparently indifferent towards them. Freud and Birlingham tell us that after three years of age children will not normally forget their parents, and their memories tend to be more stable, since it is easier for them to find active and conscious expression for their feelings, the image of the parents remains in their mind, especially when helped from the outside by frequent visits, gift parcels, and constant talk about the parents. It is natural in the phantasy life of the child for the absent parents to seem better, bigger, kinder, and the natural negative feelings that children also have about their parents to undergo repression; however, this repression creates a variety of mood and behavioural problems. But eventually, because children live mostly in the present and because new bonds are inevitably formed in their new environment, these children too move their affection towards the parental substitutes. This creates all sorts of problems when it is time for the child to return home, especially, for the younger ones, because the children’s home has become home for them, and of course, it is painful and stressful for parents.

Another topic they discuss is anxiety and the more common types of air raid anxiety. They begin by explaining that children need to be safeguarded against the primitive horrors of the war, not so much because horrors and aggression are completely strange to them, but because during these early and decisive stages of their development it is important for them to overcome and estrange themselves from the primitive aggressive wishes of their own infantile nature. They explain how after the first years of life the child gradually learns to refuse to give conscious expression to certain aggressive instinctive wishes. The child learns that it is bad to kill, to hurt and to destroy, but can only keep up this attitude when the people in the outer world do likewise. Freud and Burlingham say that when children see killing and destruction going on outside it arouses their fear that the impulses which they have only a short while ago buried will be awakened again, and this they add, explains why younger children in whom these inhibitions against aggression have not yet been established is free of the abhorrence of air raids. However, slightly older children that have just been through this developmental process can be particularly sensitive to the menace of air raids, and can have real outbreaks of anxiety when bombs come down and do damage around them.

One other reason for the development of fear reactions is also the fact that a child is afraid naturally and sensibly when there is some real danger in the outside world that threatens either their safety or existence. The fear will be all the greater the more the child knows about the seriousness of the danger, and the fear will urge him / her to either fight it or if that is impossible, try to escape from it, and if the danger is overwhelming then the child will be shocked and paralysed into inaction. They also clarify that knowledge and reason only play a limited part in a child’s life. Its interest quickly turns away from the real things in the outer world, especially when these things are scary or unpleasant, Children deny the facts, get rid of their fear, and revert back to their childish interests, toys, games and phantasies.

They also refer to a third type of anxiety, which develops a little later into a fear of the child’s own conscience, and this is the fear of authority and prohibitions, when the child more or less has learnt what to do and what not to do “under the direction of a nucleus of inner ideas, which is his own conscience”. They claim that the child “turns back continually to the figures of the outside world, on the one hand, and to the imaginations of his/her own phantasy on the other, and borrows strength from both to reinforce the inner commandments.” It is the stage when children are afraid of ghosts and bogeymen, sometimes used as reinforcements of the real parental figures and of the inner voice. Freud and Burlingham add that children have a large list of dangers which serve as convenient symbols for their conscience, they can be afraid of policemen, gypsies, robbers, and other figures, real or fictional, dragons, lions and tigers, earthquakes and thunder and lightning. When they receive religious teaching they are afraid of the devil and of hell or that God will know what they’re thinking or when they’ve been naughty, and as a result punish them, while those who receive no religious teaching will transfer the same fear to other things like the moon, and so on.  Children often also fear the end of the world, abandonment and the death of their parents. Therefore, Freud and Burlingham note, air raids, sirens and bombs, are simply new symbols for old fears, and Hitler and German planes take the place of the devil or wild animals. Finally, children do not only develop the fears which belong to their own age and stage of development, but that they also internalize the fear reactions of their mothers, and of the grown-up world around them.

Another theme included in the book is how children deal with shocks, deprivations, and upsets in their outside life, since psychological methods which are open to adults are not yet available in childhood, One outlet, for instance, when something disruptive or traumatic happens is that of speech, which is not an option for the younger children, and while adults can go over their experiences in conscious thought and speech, young children cannot. For children there’s the outlet of play and they can process things in their play. Children like adults can also find an outlet to what’s traumatic or painful or unwanted in behaviour. Freud and Burlington write, “Some children are unable to express what has happened to them either in speech or in play. Instead, they develop behaviour which seems cranky to the outside world until it can be recognised.” They can also find an outlet in phantasy. Children largely use conscious phantasies to embellish and maintain the positive side of the child-parent relationship. Children can also regress, in other words, return to infantile modes of behaviour because, as Freud and Burlington say, every step in early education is closely connected with one of the phases of the child’s attachment to someone in the outer world. Bed wetting can also occur because it takes time before bladder and sphincter control becomes purely automatic, and “a small child will normally have a setback in its habits when it changes hands,” and this can often be one of the expressions of a breakdown of their relationships with their mother or primal caregivers.

Freud and Burlingham also discuss responses of gratification that children can regress to or over indulge in as mechanisms of soothing. Demands for affection can be transformed into a demand for food or material presents, which can be used as a symbol for the mother, which means that the child has regressed to the stage when the value of the mother was still measured in terms of the material comfort derived from her person. Denial and regression can also lead to greed for food or sweets. As for aggression, they say, during these violent times, children at the nursery stage can become more aggressive and destructive than they were found to be in normal times, and due to the loosening of early repression and inhibition of aggression, as a result of what they experience and see in the outside world, it is easy for the child to return to earlier developmental modes of expression. They mention that a frequent occurrence in all the residential war nurseries was older children’s temper tantrums.

Another response displayed by children was abnormal emotional withdrawal or emotional outbreaks. They provide examples of children who had moved around a lot and how disruptive this was for them in different ways. For instance, they describe how a young boy, whose mother was in hospital with tuberculosis and who had been placed in a variety of contexts, seemed completely devoid of all emotion. He stayed where he was put and did not seem afraid of the new surroundings, made no distinction between one grown-up and another, clung to no one and avoided no one, ate, slept and played and was no trouble to anybody. This ice was broken only when he fell ill and was isolated with one nurse, who put her arm around him to keep the themometre in place, which aroused in him memories of being in his mother’s arms. A girl, on the other hand, who had been placed in six different unsuitable places between the age of two and three, failed to recognise her rmother though both parents visited in turns fortnightly. She had emotional outbreaks of a hysterical type and displayed phobic and compulsive behaviours, would not go to bed, could not sleep, would not eat, fought against being bathed, washed, dressed or undressed, told phantastic tales of negative events, and had lost interest in the real world. Also, children that had been moved around a lot or whose placements had gone wrong, sometimes engaged in a continual abandoning of people they were attached for the sake of others who were new. One girl, for instance, having lost her stable relationship to her parents lived continually in search of new people to attach to. Freud and Burlingham write that they recognised this symptom of flight from one object to the other in adults as one of the results of early disturbances of their mother or early caregiver relationship.

The second part of the book includes reports from January 1941 till December 1942, which give us an opportunity to follow the events as they occurred and see how Freud and Burlingham reached their conclusions. This part of the book contains many short vignettes, which allow us to catch a glimpse of what was going on in the children’s hearts and minds, and also, what it was like for the mothers, diverse as they were, who were forced through the war circumstance to separate from their children sometimes as young as a few weeks old. This is the more moving part of the book and at times I found tears welling up as I read it, and it also made me wonder how these war children coped with all this experience as they got older and how all this impacted their lives in adulthood.

In this part they also describe parents’ responses, working class parents in particular, how the home took on the character of a coffee house, club or restaurant during weekends as parents were encouraged to visit freely, spend time with their children, eat meals with them, and take them for walks. They also provide examples of how different children reacted to air raids and of how separation can impact children differently depending on many factors, and also, on how evacuation is done. A three year old boy, who had been separated from his mother several times due to her being sick, on trying to keep his promise to his mom to be “a good boy and not cry” tied himself into a knot. Freud and Birlingham write, “We were shocked to see an apparently healthy child develop a compulsive tie under our very eyes.” While the other children were mostly busy with their toys, playing games, making music, eating, Patrick engaged in one compulsive behaviour after another, all the while trying to be brave. Fortunately, his mother recovered and she took the paid post of emergency night nurse, which meant that she spent five nights weekly in the same house with Patrick, which in turn allowed Patrick to evolve into “one of the most active children in the playroom.”

Examples of how children act out things in play are also included. For instance, the day after the big air attack on London on the 16th of April, several children had climbed up on the jungle gym, and were preparing to drop a heavy iron object they had found in the garden, proudly asserting that it was a bomb. Another example of how play reflects experiences and also helps children process them was their request to turn an empty bookshelf into a dolls’ shelter. There’s also reference to processes of identification, where in, one instance, a little girl possibly developed a consistent cough in imitation of her father’s cough after he died.

The creation of artificial orphans, which is one of the most serious objections to war time evacuation of young children without their mothers, is also explored. For the young children the bodily absence or presence of the mother is significant because the emotional needs of the child cannot be satisfied from a distance, and the love of the infant for its mother is closely bound up with the fulfilment of these needs, and when the mother is absent, the child forms, “after a short period of longing, a new relationship to a substitute mother.” Freud and Burlingham point out that although all these children who are separated from their parents are also war orphans the attitude of the world is to disregard this expecting the evacuated children to “fret and get over it in ‘no time’”. They conclude that it is “precisely the study of the real war orphan and his reactions, which may be of help to create a better understanding of the evacuated child”.

Many other topics are also explored like their decision to create artificial families and assign children to substitute mothers because they had noticed that certain steps in development were slow in coming in spite of all the opportunities provided, and children were reluctant to grow out of their baby habits. This decision, they soon observed, brought about astonishing results. They also discuss the inner ambivalent attitudes of the mothers, pointing out that they had observed that although a lot had been said about the foster mothers, not much attention had been paid to the biological mothers and how they felt and dealt with the separations and the predicament they found themselves in, on the one hand, wanting to keep their children safe, better fed and educated, and on the other hand, their natural inclination and desire to keep their children close to them, and their fear of the effects of separation. They also discuss the experience of a smaller group of mothers, who were less “motherly” or more ambivalent in regrads to their children, and also, mothers in difficult circumstances with “illegitimate” babies, for whom the nursey provided an outlet, and sometimes also helped them to work out their conflicting feelings and attach to their babies.

In one of the final chapters Freud and Burlingham reveal to us through short vignettes the children’s meaning making of the war, and what questions they raised and what conclusions they reached. One child concluded that the Germans bombed them because they had been noisy. Another commented that the German pilot was kind because he didn’t drop it on their home, and another when told that the German pilot was caught was not relieved, but worried about his fate and said that he would not like to see a dead man. The children also understood the war as a conflict between God and Hitler, good and evil. They wondered why God made the Germans nasty, who he would help win the war, and one child asserted that God would help both because he loves all people.

I will end this piece today with an extract from the article: War Children: Victims, Threats and Promises of the Future [Enfants de la guerre. Victimes, menaces et promesses d’avenir] by Stefania Bernini

“Against the evacuation approach, adopted by the British government since the beginning of the conflict, Freud and Burlingham argued that the war had its worst impact on children when it broke down family life and uprooted “the first emotional attachments of the child within the family group”. The paradoxical conclusion was that “London children […] were on the whole much less upset by bombing than by evacuation to the country as a protection against it” (Freud, Burlingham 1947: 171-73; Bowlby, Winnicott, Miller 1939: 1202-1203). Separation from the mother was the event most likely to produce lasting damages in children (Howarth 1941, Odlum 1941). The age of the child and the way the evacuation was organized, argued Freud and Burlingham, were crucial in determining the likely outcomes. On the whole, the analysis carried out in the Hampstead Nurseries, like those conducted among evacuated children by Susan Isaacs in 1941, put forward a stark picture of the impact of war on British children and cast a shadow on what would happen in its aftermath (Isaacs 1941).5 By turning their attention to children’s deepest and often hidden reactions to war, Freud and Burlingham suggested that even an apparently undamaged child could harbour the seed of later psychological and emotional sufferance. They gave voice to a fear that would remain at the core of post war reconstruction” (https://journals.openedition.org/revss/5812?lang=en).

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Incidental Inventions

(From an interview on June 8th, 2015, at: https://www.europaeditions.com/review/2104)

Interviewer: “You’ve mentioned disappearance—it’s one of your recurring themes.

Elena Ferrante:  “It’s a feeling I know well. I think all women know it. Whenever a part of you emerges that’s not consistent with some feminine ideal, it makes everyone nervous, and you’re supposed to get rid of it in a hurry. Or… if you refuse to be subjugated, violence enters in. Violence has, at least in Italian, a meaningful language of its own—smash your face, bash your face in. You see? These are expressions that refer to the forced manipulation of identity, to its cancellation. Either you’ll be the way I say, or I’ll change you by beating you till I kill you.”

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I’ve recently been reading two non-fiction books I bought some time ago, War and Children, written in 1943 by psychoanalysts Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, which focuses on how war affects the development of children, and who assert that “development demands its own conditions, irrespective of war and peace or all other happenings in the outer world,” and Incidental Inventions, a collection of short pieces by Elena Ferrante. I wrote about both books simulataneously, thinking that I might post both pieces together, but decided to upload the text related to Ferrante, and save the article on Freud and Burlingham’s work for August.

Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for an Italian novelist / writer, who has been lauded as ‘one of the great novelist of our time,” and who has received several awards. However, despite her fame and success she has chosen to keep her identity hidden; wanting to remain totally private. Maintaining her anomymity possibly allows her to write about things she might not otherwise have had the courage to write about, and to preserve a space of creative freedom, enhancing her capacity to both create and publish on her own terms. She has stated that shyness is also one of the reasons behind her choice, and perhaps remaining anonymous also makes it easier for her to exist and work within her environment. However, although Ferrante shuns publicity, the mystery surrounding her identity and the speculation that has grown around it has probably also sparked more interest in her work. In written interviews (she avoids face to face interviews) she says that the readers can extract the author’s shape from the book and the text itself. In the interview mentioned above Ferrante noted that it seems to her that “the emptiness created by my [her] absence was filled by the writing itself.”

From her interviews and non-fiction works, it is known that Ferrante was born in Naples, is the daughter of a seamstress, and has lived outside Italy. She appears to have studied the classics and to have been married. She is a mother and grandmother. She has stated that in addition to writing, she studies, translates and teaches. Critics and readers of her work have deduced much more from her fictional heroines, but a lot of these conclusions might actually not be precise. Similarities between her characters and what is known about her life lead critics to consider her work autobiographical to a great extent or to suggest that the novelist in her Neapolitan novels, Elena Greco, is Ferrante’s avatar;. However, what can really be known from her fiction books are her words and sentences, and patterns of her mind and imagination. In the interview cited above, Ferrante refers to O’Rourke who wrote that “the reader’s relationship to a writer who chooses to separate herself, radically, from her own book “is like that which we have with a fictional character. We think we know her, but what we know are her sentences, the patterns of her mind, the path of her imagination.”

Incidental Inventions, which Ferrante describes as “brief trickles of ink,” consists of a collection of short pieces she wrote over a year (2018), for a weekly column in The Guardian. The book was first published in 2019, and is illustrated by Andrea Ucini.

Her subjects are diverse: first times and first love, climate change, enmity and competition among women, and people more genrally, friendship and the rarity of great friends, the process of adapting her novels for film and television, marriage, laughter, her past smoking addiction, fears, ellipses, motherhood and daughters, keeping a diary, the urgency of writing, how writing distances the writer from other aspects of life, the role of luck in an artists’ breakthrough, linguistic nationality, translation, her exercise in re-thinking male heroes in literature as female, anonymity and what can be discovered about an artist through their work alone, questions of feminism and art produced by women, the difficulty of women becoming themselves in a world made for men, the sense of feeling as not being enough, poetry and prose, the past I or me in a photograph, the weather and the seasons, exclamation marks, death, religion and the trembling of the three Marys, insomnia, the pleasure of learning, the politics of her country, Italy, and the danger to democracy, “as [the demagogue leader] bangs his xenophobic and racist fists on the table,” psychoanalysis and therapy and the power indifferences inherent within the analyst-client relationship, how the classification of human beings into winners and losers is both cruel and arbitrary because the conditions at the point of starting out are too unjust to think of as a competition in which the odds are not stacked, love of films and the screen versions of many actors and actresses, and how reality can’t stay inside the elegant moulds of art, the desperation and the sense of loss that dominates Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, mobile phones, interviews, her love and fear of plants, stereotypes, writing for the screen, the age-old discussion of talent, the deluge of news nowadays, literary novelty, lies, change and clean breaks, and more.

A selection of a few interesting or wise points she makes in the book on a variety of topics:

About first times and first love she says that even though we attribute to them the power of the unrepeatable, ultimately they get swallowed up by all the times that have followed or by their transformation into habit. She notes that what we were at the beginning is only “a vague patch of colour contemplated from the edge of what we have become.” In her piece on fear she points out that what perhaps should be feared most is the fury of frightened people. On death she tells us that as time has gone by the idea of death itself seems increasingly pallid, and what is truly terrifying is the end of an enjoyable life, of a full life. In relation to the age old discussion of talent she notes that the poet (or artist) has to have not only the gift of talent, and the privilege and the culture of being able to nurture and refine it, but also luck.

Concerning fiction and non-fiction, she states that the dividing line is rather, as Virginia Woolf said, how much truth the fiction inherent in writing is able to capture. On laughter and its power, she believes that no power has ever yielded an inch thanks to a laugh. “Ridicule, yes, annoys the powerful, but it doesn’t bury them. Yet for the moment we’re laughing, we feel their grip on our life relax a little. Laughter is a short, very short, sigh of relief.” In her enjoyable piece on the exclamation point Ferrante first tells us that she tries to express with restraint, tending towards self-mockery, and she admires those who maintain a calm demeanour during an argument. She then says that in a passage an exclamation should be understood by reading and there is no need to add it at the end, but nowadays writers are lavish with exclamation marks in text messages, in WhatsApp chats, and in emails. She finally adds: “At least in writing we should avoid acting like the fanatical world leaders who threaten, bargain, make deals, and then exult when they win, fortifying their speeches with the profile of a nuclear missile at the end of every wretched sentence.”

There’s also an interesting short essay titled Linguistic Nationality. She tells us that although she loves her country, simplified versions of national characteristics should be contested. She herself, for instance, digests pizza poorly and eats very little spaghetti, doesn’t speak in a loud voice, doesn’t gesticulate, and hates all mafias. Being Italian, for her, begins and ends with the fact that she speaks and writes in the Italian language, which like all languages is “a compendium of the history, geography, material and spiritual life, the vices and virtues, not only of those who speak it, but also of those who have spoken it through the centuries. The words, the grammar, the syntax are a chisel that shapes our thought….” There’s also a piece dedicated to translation, in which she notes that “translators transport nations into other nations.” As for her past smoking addiction she comments that she discovered that she couldn’t let go of cigarettes, because she was afraid of seeing the world in all its sharp-edged clarity.

On art and anonymity Ferrante tells us that ever since adolescence, she liked the term “unknown,” which, she explains means that all we can know of the person who made a painting is the work we have before our eyes. She says that before her is simply the composition of a human being who summoned their inventive energy to create and that she can devote herself to the pure result of a creative gesture, without worrying about a big or small name. She also writes about how when writing she likes to dig into common situations and feelings, and she insists on expressing everything that we tend to be silent about. She’s interested in causing confusion, pushing herself to go beyond appearances, sweeping away the resistance of the ordinary and looking for words that will pull out at least a little of the extraordinary that is concealed in the ordinary.

On creative freedom she says that although a part of her would like the story in the film adaptation of her novel to adhere faithfully to her story, her less primitive and possessive self knows that there’s something much more important at stake than this instinct to protect her own inventions, because women writers (artists) are still assigned to the balcony…. She writes, “Another woman has found in that text good reason to test her creative capacities. Gyllenhaal has decided, that is, to give cinematic form not to my experience of the world but to hers….. In the great warehouse of the arts, set up mainly by men, women have for a relatively short time been seeking the means and opportunities to give a form of their own to what they have learned from life. So I don’t want to say: you have to stay inside the cage that I constructed.”

This collection of short essays also includes a piece on the bond between mothers and daughters. She notes “A secret cord that can’t be cut binds us to the bodies of our mothers: there is no way to detach ourselves, or at least I’ve never managed to. It’s impossible to go back inside her; it’s hard to move past her shadow.” Concerning the younger generations, she fears the generations who don’t proudly leave their parents behind, but also those who, at twenty, leave their parents behind to embrace the mores of grandparents and great-grandparents and desire to replace the world of today with “a golden age when everyone knew their place, that is, in an order based on sexist and racist hierarchies.” She goes on to tell us that she loves young people who fight to give their time a new form and demand a better life for the entire human race, and hopes that her daughters stay that way for a long time., and then as is in the natural order of things as they get older “they’ll find me within themselves, discovering physical details, flashes of personality, thoughts, and will learn to welcome me, make room for me. As happened with my mother and me, they’ll discover that, even admitting they’re partly me, they’ll continue to be themselves. In fact they’ll be themselves more fully, with greater autonomy.”

On the future of humanity she comments that it’s urgent that we humans learn to be self-critical and learn to confront the truth of ourselves, before we’re destroyed by our obstinate determination to become immortal. “The future that interests me,” Ferrante writes, “is a future of absolute openness to the other, to any living being, to everything endowed with the breath of life.” And elsewhere she asks: “Was it possible the animal man, that infinitesimal piece of nature, in the course of his brief history had managed to irreversibly damage all the rest?” As for the flood of news, fake and real, she notes  that for her “the problem is not, therefore, to stay well informed, but to track within the mass of pointlessly amplified news that which will help me to distinguish, over time, the true and the false, the best and the worst: this is an extremely difficult task.” She ponders why certain people seem to us so different that we can’t accept them, can’t recognise their humanity, and wonders whether a little goodwill could remove any reason for hostility. She concludes with thoughts about the issue of inequality, which she points out “generates an extraordinary waste of minds and creative energies, which, if they were trained and put to use, would likely make our history an active laboratory for repairing the damage we’ve caused so far—or at least of controlling its effects, rather than an unbearable list of horrors.”

To conclude, I felt that each short piece allows us to catch a glimpse of her inner world and life, and also provides insights into her outlook on life. Her writing here seems self-investigative, urgent and intimate, while also maintaining her anonymity. Ferrante notes that writing these weekly essays has been a permanent exposure of fragments of herself. It also informed by a feminist outlook. In one review of her work, one critic writes that her books are influenced by second wave feminism, particularly Italian feminists like Luisa Murano and writers like Helene Cixous, who has written that “women must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away……….. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history…..” Ferrante calls this reclaiming of voice, female alientation-inclusion. She seems to be drawn to the ways that women operate and survive in a society dominated by men and their power. It is also useful to bear in mind that her stories are embedded in particular contexts and times. She writes about what surrounds her heroines, postwar Naples, for instance, how others and their voice permeate them, and what it means to absorb another’s voice.

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Writing on the Wall 

“You pick your way past young men and girls sitting on the steps, you wander bewildered among those austere walls which students’ hands have arabesqued with outsize capital writing and detailed graffiti, just as the cavemen felt the need to decorate the cold walls of their caves to become masters of the tormenting mineral alienness, to make them familiar, empty them into their own inner space, annex them to the physical reality of living.” Italo Calvino

Today’s post is about graffitti and Madeleine Pelling’s book, Writing on the Wall. Pelling is a British cultural historian, writer, podcaster and contributor for TV and radio, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, who has held research fellowships at the universities of Yale, Edinburgh and Manchester. With her book she transports us back in time, bringing to life the atmosphere of the spaces and historical events she discusses. Personally, reading the book felt a bit like watching a period film or reading extracts from a Charles Dickens’ book. Pelling has managed not only to narrate the history and evolution of graffitti, while situating it in the midst of historical events and architectural spaces, but also to bring to life the grim realities and atmosphere of the periods she is discussing. Finally, towards the end of the book she makes references to events concerning graffitti and contemporary political issues.

Pelling has gone in search mostly of the hidden voices of 18th century Britain, a turbulent and transformative historical period, and a time when anyone with a sharp pointed object or a piece of chalk or charcoal could leave their mark on walls, ceilings, windows, and public monuments. Through marks made by both the poor and the rich, by ordinary people and upper class citizens and parliamentary figures, we get to look into these otherwise invisible stories, and gain insight into a tumultuous time in British history through its graffitti. Pelling tells us that graffiti is one of hundreds of words used over the past few centuries to describe this type of messaging via words, symbols and images, a form of expression and messaging we can find across time from the Ancient Egyptians to the present. She discusses the importance of graffitti in revealing untold stories that would otherwise have been lost in time, and how this form of expression and communication allows us to get a glimpse of what life was like behind the scenes.

The book is organised in three parts, which include three different periods: (1688-1740), (1740-1780), and (1780-1800), focuses on both the content and sites of graffitti, and also includes illustrations, photographs and art work. She begins with William Hogarth’s series of engraved images, The Four Stages of Cruelty. As she describes a scene, at one point she writes: “Alongside this combative encounter between perceived high and low life, royal morality and plebeian baseness, a third man is writing on the wall….” She goes on to provide a brief socioeconomic critique commenting “The scene is cut through with criticism of the inequalities and brutalities Hogarth and his contemporaries witnessed all around them in the eighteenth century.” She poses questions like whether those born to a life of poverty and crime were destined to perpetuate it and what role did writing on the wall play in the debate between the grim realities faced at the time by so many of the nation’s poor with the ideas of Enlightenment that were emerging.

Pelling explains that as literacy increased among the population at large, and as a public sphere [defined by spaces like coffee houses, taverns, drinking venues, brothels, and powered by debate], began to emerge, writing on walls and other surfaces offered a relatively unpoliced and unrestricted way of making oneself heard. The messages on these surfaces had moved away from the religious and domestic settings they occupied in previous centuries to reflect the new more complex world, as towns and cities were rebuilt after the civil war, the plague, and in the case of London, the fire of the previous century, fed on the wealth of an expanding empire. Pelling writes that issues like the justice and penal systems, a variety of inequalities and issues of parliamentarian representation, as well as, the religious character of the nation or where the power of the monarch ended and that of Parliament began, were all debated, and this debate was reflected on walls and other surfaces. This material included anything from political slogans and drawings and sketches, to love letters, satirical poems, notes of displeasure, anger and hatred, resistance and financial ruin, libellous accusations, religious or prophetic warnings, and even reviews of sex workers* (I am a ware of the critique of this term by feminists, but this is the term used in the book).

Through reading the book we understand how leaving a mark, not only on the page, but also on the wall, could change lives, shift public opinion and feelings, and shape political events. This is made excessively clear as we read how political and religious conflict played out in graffiti across the country, as well as, on the battlefield, and how a simple chalk marking triggered events like the arrest and execution of an immigrant, Roman Catholic midwife, which had then contributed to a further deterioration in Catholic–Protestant relations, the dethroning of the Catholic King by William and Mary at the end of 1688, and all the events that followed.

One of Pelling’s sources is a published collection of graffitti found across London’s coffee houses, taverns, streets and privies, titled, The Merry-Thought; or, The Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, by an anonymous writer in 1731. This work would go on to become a best-seller, probably because the recorded messages resonated with the readers’ unarticulated commonalities, desires, secret thoughts, fears, losses, grievances and prejudices. Pelling notes that the writing on the walls of London served as a visible reminder of the tragic inequality that reigned.and the fragile balance of power. She writes: “London was a city with two faces: a respectable, polite and powdered veneer; and a seamier, pockmarked reality that festered beneath. These worlds did not exist in isolation, but rather side by side, sometimes in the same streets, houses and even rooms.” Meanwhile, in 1720, the collapse of the South Sea Company, which was originally set up to supply enslaved Africans to plantations in America, and which brought a lot of wealth, took place, with a catastrophic fallout, where fortunes were lost, and many went bankrupt.

Those who found their worlds shrunk to the size of a prison cell also left their marks on walls and surfaces. Pelling tells us prisons were microcosms of Georgian society, miniature, enclosed places with their own distinct cultures and economies, where state and subject collided. She writes that at the time the boundaries between social rank, power and morality regularly blurred, and poverty, debt, prejudice, ambition and greed or revenge, could throw “many Britons on the mercy of corruptible justice and penal systems tasked with maintaining order in a fast-changing society.” She adds that the risks of unfair treatment, miscarriages of justice and exploitation were high, the cells dank and squalid, disease was rife in the prisons, bribery proliferated, inmate treatment was subject to the whims and personalities of gaolers, people who had gone bankrupt or owed debts were packed in with convicts who had committed severe crimes, prisoners had few rights or access to healthcare, and were even used as medical guinea pigs. Entrepreneurial gaolers charged visiting fees so that the curious could peer into cells rendering inmates as “curiosities to be gawped at and characters to be reimagined in the minds of the masses.”

Additionally, many of the detained in prisons were on their way to transportation to the colonies, a practice that bolstered the colonial labour force by supplying able bodies to colonies in America and later in Australia. And they were probably some of the lucky ones, since at the time 200 crimes carried the death penalty! Prisoners carved their initials, names, poetry, prayers and confessions, the outlines of objects like guns and gallows, ships, buildings, and even elaborate streets, onto the surface of the prison walls. Pelling writes: “Graffiti was the language of the disenfranchised, and an invaluable means of asserting autonomy and resistance in a system that allowed for little preservation of self.” With a piece of coal or chalk, fire, blood or any sharp implement, inmates told their stories to assert themselves as victims or perpetrators, and their marks reveal a lot about how convicts saw themselves and the society that had denounced them. Today some of these marks have found their way into the works of contemporary artists who are trying to depict these spaces of incarceration blurring the lines between reality and fiction, high art and the perceived primitivism of this material.

In tracing the history of graffitti, the book allows us to visit significant events like the industrial revolution and the changes it brought, the Jacobite risings in Scotland and northern England, conflict with France and Spain, and revolution in the American colonies, Britain’s brush with civic uproar in June 1780 and the fear of a rebellion. Then in 1789 when violent insurrection engulfed Paris, emptying the Bastille of its prisoners and marking the symbolic start of the French Revolution, anxiety across the Channel reached new heights. Pelling writes that Britons would weaponise graffiti to fight their causes and that the role of graffiti cast a long shadow over the final decades of the eighteenth century. She notes that both writing on the wall and an emerging hieroglyphic vocabulary had proved “a formidable tool in the insurrectionist’s arsenal, articulating disenfranchisement, pointing out difference and directing crowds.”

Across the surfaces of Britain and its colonies, graffitti would help ask questions about the nature of freedom and who was and was not entitled to it. In the 18th century Britain’s rural poor, had turned from the fields into urban factories, where most lived in dire circumstances. This led workers’ unions to complain about the mechanisation of previously skilled and specialist work, and to advocate for basic rights and decent wages. Graffiti, once again, offered a relatively uncensored and anonymised mode of complaint against the commodification of human labour and the disappearance of craftsmanship and local community. Meanwhile, during the earliest years of Romanticism artists were exploring new ways of writing, painting and being, free from prior artistic and social convention, and as Pelling notes, mark making was fast becoming a shorthand for intellectual liberation.

Additionally, soldiers, on both sides of the English civil wars, also took to leaving their mark and the names of battles fought. For soldiers and sailors serving across the British Empire graffiti was a tool to mark their existence in a life fraught with dangers and without guarantee of survival. Pelling tells us that among the most prolific graffitists of Britain’s empire were its sailors; however, as new ideas around the value of freedom, dignity and human life emerged, and amidst the increasing calls for abolition of slavery, mark making was also practised by a wide range of individuals across the colonial world, including the oppressed and the enslaved.

Prisoners of war also took to filling up wall spaces. Pelling tells us that in 1815 approximately one-quarter of a million prisoners of war, mostly but not exclusively French, were held in Britain. Among these prisoners were displaced and enslaved men and women from the Carribean, who had been invited to fight in exchange for their freedom. Through the means of writing and drawing on the wall they showed their national and political loyalties from within the oppressive spaces of incarceration like castles, towers and ship gaols. Graffiti, writes Pelling, could track the progress of colonisation on land and sea and document its resistance, provide a remarkable record of human thought, feeling and fight for freedom.

A different set of prisoners in a different era, predominantly in the Tudor and Elizabethan periods, also left their mark on the wall, sometimes with more elaborate graffiti like those at the Tower of London, one of Britain’s most famous historic buildings and still in use as a tool of the state in the 18th century. Graffitti in codes and symbols of condemned queens, martyred servants and rebels were discovered in 1796 by John Brand, for whom, writes Pelling, “the graffiti of the doomed represented not only moments in political history – the courtly machinations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in particular – but also human anguish.” Also, at the time, the execution of the French roayal couple had spread panic among the British patricians, and Brand was aware of the volatile political situation and the fact that, as Pelling comments, crafting history was (and still is) a fraught and complicated business, and there were questions of authenticity and politics to consider because this material from the past could be used to unspool more than one narrative depending on who was telling it.

A story is also included in the book that demonstrates how intertwined personal and socioeconomic contexts are. She tells us the story of a highly respected in his trade ceramic painter, a generous and loved individual, James Doe, who committed suicide in 1979, after leaving a lengthy suicide letter, if one could call it that, which was customary at the time, not on paper but on the wall of the last place he resided. Pelling notes “Doe’s tale was one of ingenuity, art, industrial espionage, inequality and betrayal.” She discusses how a deep personal betrayal by a friend he had supported when imprisoned for industrial espionage, while risking his own reputation and savings, had ultimately lead to loss of his own reputation, employment and money, and how this reality was interconnected with the upheaval that the industrial revolution was causing, as mechanised production was rapidly erasing the human stories behind made things, as well as, traditional types of work, and how it was also leading to a decrease of food production, which in turn decreased the supply of food and led to hunger. Pelling comments: “the industrial boom was quickly creating a vast and hungry urban workforce supported by a dwindling rural population.”

The association between a message or marking on the wall and suicide in the book brought to my mind the principal and chemistry teacher of the Lyceum I attended, who on the first day of school during assembly and after the prayer was over, welcomed us with a “didactic story.” He pointed to a Nietzsche quote written high up on the wall of a building, taller than the walls of our school, and told us that the student who had written it had committed suicide, and the reason leading to this act was her reading Nietzsche. Of course, it was a lie because a teenage girl being able to write the phrase in such big print so high up would not have been practically possible, requiring a professional scaffolding, at least. But sadly this was his introductory advice to us, perhaps in attempt to erect an unconscious wall of fear to engaging with philosophy or developing critical thinking.

To conclude, according to Pelling, mark making of words, slogans, symbols and images on walls, windows, alleyways, churches, monuments, prisons, ships, rocks and trees, towers and castles, has served lots of purposes and has provided an outlet to emotions and creativity. She writes that graffitti, which had developed its own vocabularies and codes, challenged power and made the grievances, injustices, inequalities and complaints of the invisible visible, allowed Britain to converse and laugh with itself, question the status quo and react to events from the Jacobite risings to Romanticism, unite communities and tear them apart, and spread campaigns of hate and messages of love. It evolved from something everyday and unremarkable to a more effective political tool that was at various points perceived as evidence of criminality or condemned by authorities. It was also used as an act of self-memorialisation and a means to record micro-histories, moments in individual lives. It brought to the foreground the proximity between high art and graffiti, and the delineations of social class that lay therein, and it often became a record of pain, loss and suffering, of physical and creative labour, and a lasting means that has carried messages and memory to the present.