Elegy without a ceremony: "Secrets Deep in Tiger Forests" by Poe Ballantine

Fiction often deals with tragedies and traumas, but there are a number of performative functions a story can play in framing a trauma. It can memorialize, lament, celebrate, heal, criticize, exhort, blame, excuse, or simply bear witness. None of these approaches is better than the others. For major traumas in human history, such as the Holocaust, it's important that culture produce art that plays all of these roles.

A culture can, perhaps, end up with an imbalance in the actions the stories of a particular generation perform. It can produce too many patriotic stories in response to trauma, for example. For 20 years after Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia, its literature produced little else than stories lionizing the martyrs of the revolution and pointing to their suffering as a reason why Eritrea needed to go it alone.

I wonder if American literature hasn't produced too much literature of the lament or elegy form in response to the non-stop American wars of the last 17 years. The veteran with PTSD story is so ubiquitous nowadays, I wonder if it's partly responsible for the stereotype that all veterans suffer from it. If this is true, then the very act of creating stories meant to help veterans may be inadvertently hurting some of them.

Stories don't have to be about Iraq or Afghanistan to really be about Iraq or Afghanistan. Much like M*A*S*H used the Korean War to comment on the war in Vietnam, some writers are using Vietnam as a stand-in for talking about the Unending Wars. (I talked about a story like this in 2017.)

"Secrets Deep in Tiger Forests" by Poe Ballantine is also such a story. It's set in what appears to be a working-class neighborhood during the Vietnam War, at a time when young men are coming home in body bags or as shadows of their former selves. The unnamed first-person narrator is a teenager only a few years shy of the same age as the young men who went off to war from his neighborhood. He observes the effect of the war on those around him, especially Raja, the older son of the Carrs next door.

The Carrs have had a lot of bad luck, it seems. Mrs. Carr died a year before the story takes place, and her oldest son Raja "went off to war a serious boy in a uniform, but when he came back, he was no longer Raja." Raja can't even talk. He just laughs and smiles. Raja's younger brother Whitey is acting out, beating up on the narrator once a week, and then being nice sometimes in between beatings. Mavis, the older of two daughters, is pregnant, and gossip says her father is also the father of her baby, although the father has since also died of leukemia. The youngest daughter, Queenie, is starting to show signs of a budding sexuality herself, a sexuality the narrator notices, and it probably won't be long before she gets pregnant herself.

The narrator comes home one day to find Raja has been carted off to a mental health facility. He'd have gone to the facility sooner, but the wait to get in was too long. The family couldn't keep taking care of him. The story ends with a grief that can't find a voice: "...old peasant women with mangled teeth who yacked and yelled at me without a sound."

It's a very short story, and maybe best viewed as a sad bildungsroman in which the narrator learns about the world he's about to inherit and doesn't find much to look forward to. The kids in the neighborhood who've just gone the path he's about to go down came back mean or broken or dead. America is a place where young men are very often fed to whatever issue politicians believe cannot possibly be resolved without sending them to die. It still is. As much as America wanted to keep the Unending Wars from becoming Vietnam when they started, they became much more Vietnam than even Vietnam was. Even President Trump cannot find a way to end our never-ending commitments there, although he's certainly tried, above the complaints of his generals.

Yes, Colonel Potter, that sums up my thoughts on 18 years of war with no end in sight.

In addition to a bildungsroman, the story could also be seen as an elegy. It's meant to honor and remember Raja and those like him who came back a shadow of what they were when they left. As Lincoln said of another group of war dead, it is "altogether fitting and proper" that we should honor our casualties of war like this.

But the story doesn't really offer any kind of way out for young men touched by war. For those dealing with the after-effects of war, the narrative in this story and in our culture seems to be that you will be forever broken, and it's okay. Society can only commiserate with you in your brokenness, not try to find a way to make you whole.

Contrast this with another story of a war veteran who came back changed, the unforgettable  Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko.  It's about a WW-II vet, the mixed-race Tayo, who comes back from hell in the Pacific. He is at risk of following the route many native Americans who came back from the war did, losing himself in alcohol. But medicine men help Tayo to find his own ceremony in a world that is losing all sense of the sacred, his own way to repair the broken web of the world.

The reality of Ceremony is every bit as awful as that of "Secrets Deep." Silko wasn't ducking reality by having Tayo find a way back after hell. I'm not suggesting that stories should never end without redemption. Nor do I object to occasionally dwelling or even fetishizing our sadness. I am an artist, after all. But I wonder if our generation has too great a fondness for merely diagnosing our ills. If we can post on social media about our solidarity with troops struggling to overcome trauma, we feel we've done our job.

James Mattis has spoken before about how emphasizing the PTSD aspect of military service may not be helping military members to get better. Of course we should recognize and treat illness. But as folks used to say in church, that doesn't mean we need to spend so much time talking about the devil we end up praising him. It's okay to encourage people to put themselves back together. It doesn't all have to be appreciating how broken they are.

Maybe it's because when it comes to repairing spiritual wounds, our culture doesn't have much to offer. We have no ceremonies to cleanse ourselves, because we don't believe in anything sacred. Our view of psychological healing is a consumer one: we go to a professional who gives us drugs. We continue going forever, which means we consume forever.

I'm not saying nobody should see a psychiatrist, although I wish we were as skeptical about diagnoses of depression as we are about diagnosing too many kids with attention deficit disorder. But we need more than just a consumer doctor-patient model to make us well again. We need a spiritual life as a society. One of the sources of that healing spirituality is our mythology, our stories.

There's nothing wrong with Ballantine's story. Ballantine isn't to blame for the predilections of society. But the fact this story made it into a year's best anthology says something, I think, about how our culture views trauma and recovery. For us, a coming-of-age story about war and trauma is complete when we realize how psyche-rending the trauma is. The boy is a man when he is unmoored, confused, sexually frustrated, and unable to find a voice to express all that he now knows.