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Families at War
D.H. Melhem, Stigma & The Cave: Two Novels
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007).
Few stories evoke the personal anguish and tragedy that would accompany
the end of the world as do D.H. Melhem’s novellas, Stigma and
The Cave, the second and third parts of her Patrimonies
trilogy published this past year in a single volume. In Stigma,
we find a husband and wife reliving their lives from solitary confinement
within a fascist work camp, awaiting execution for their attempted escape.
The Cave follows a family, their friends and assorted strangers
as they struggle with each other for shelter during the first stages of
a nuclear war. If each scenario seems as if it could have been introduced
by Rod Serling, there is nothing campy about these stories, and the darkness
they explore is both challenging and imaginatively rendered.
Melhem’s careful use of first-person narration is what makes her
fiction so powerful. Both Stigma and The Cave are written
from the perspectives of the stories’ characters, and there is not
an unbelievable or incoherent voice among them. The emotions and reflections
of her characters are delivered in unusually vivid terms, and the plots
cleanly unfold in surprising ways. The nightmarish events take shape for
us through her character’s reactions to them, and if this leaves
us with a decidedly subjective picture of their worlds, the snapshots
we are given are the more potent for it. These stories do have one thing
in common with Serling’s Twilight Zone, which is a focus
on how everyday people deal with incomprehensible situations. And, as
with Serling’s program, this makes the social and political analysis
of Melhem’s fiction accessible and provocative at the same time.
These are no dry treatises on politics. The horror in each story has less
to do with its social or political context and more with the trauma visited
on the characters by dramatic political upheaval. Certainly, in both novels,
there is plenty to fear from the politics that are described. Melhem does
an excellent job of evoking an authoritarian social order through the
most minute details, from the presidential television broadcast in The
Cave that announces a nuclear war has begun, to the bureaucratic
sadism of the processing of new workers in Stigma, who are separated
from their spouses and housed in cells with new mates for the duration
of their time in the factory.
In fact, Melhem’s attention to the ways the family can be torn apart
by these circumstances is particularly astute, and both stories are moving
in this respect, even if they seem overwrought in the retelling. In Stigma
the eldest son, Michael, is so attracted by the idea of serving the state
that he is able to execute Joseph, his father, whose escape attempt has
marked him as a traitor. Toward the end of the story, we see Michael’s
version of the execution in a letter to his younger brother, and its lack
of detail is shocking. He writes, “It was very hard for me I’m
not a stone but I did my duty [sic] . . . Hail to our country” (98).
In one of the most striking passages of either work, we see Joseph’s
execution through the eyes of his wife Serafina, who watches from the
isolation of her cell.
As The Cave begins, we are introduced to a small-time thug, Burns,
and then Flora (who may be Serafina’s granddaughter -- we never
know for sure). Though unconnected, Melhem shifts between their perspectives
to illuminate their typical evenings -- Burns and his friend as they taunt
a traveling preacher, and Flora as she listlessly prepares dinner. The
story turns as the small town descends into all-out war once the news
of the nuclear attack is heard. Television and radio sets only broadcast
static after the presidential announcement of war, and though there are
reports of “the west coast” in flames, we never see any bombs
fall in the town. Yet the impact on the characters is the same as if they
had. In order to take shelter in the story’s eponymous town cave,
Burns and his friend, Duke, kill the guard at its mouth. And though they
only recently met them, the two invite Flora’s extended family inside
the cave to take shelter with them. Once there, a set of circumstances
results in Flora’s sister Mary being forced at gunpoint to leave
one child outside, only to have her other child turn against her with
Duke, the man who made her choose between them. Mary then sees Flora killed
when she attempts to seduce Burns to steal his gun. A few minutes later,
everyone in the cave is killed when a grenade is thrown against its door
from outside, causing the ceiling to fall in. Brothers of the dead guard
have found out that Burns and Duke killed him, and the grenade they toss
is their vengeance. The final commentary on this tragedy comes from the
(recently-taunted and despairing) preacher who thinks to himself amid
the dead and wounded, “Might it not all be simple, coming down to
this: one person cleaning the wounds of another? And beyond the moment,
the mercy of forgiveness, of not inflicting any wounds at all” (182).
It’s as close as Melhem comes to articulating a response to the
brutality she details. Though these stories are composed from a moral
standpoint, they do not moralize. She leaves the reader to sort through
the import of the complex chains of relations and events, and that space
is welcome after the intense experience of reading the stories themselves.
Though each narrative doesn’t lack for violence and a speedy plot,
we spend most of our time thinking along with Melhem’s characters
as they reflect on their lives. This gives Stigma and The
Cave their human center. Though ostensibly about life under fascism,
these works are just as concerned with the history of personal relationships.
Flora, the wife in The Cave, is unfulfilled in her marriage,
but represses her feelings toward her husband: “Once in awhile I
wondered whether he felt a little short-changed too, but I’d turn
away quickly from that one” (113). Though she loves him to an extent,
the story of their family’s search for shelter is wrapped up with
the story of her attraction to the man who will eventually kill her. It
remains ambiguous in the end whether she decides to seduce him because
she thinks she can, or because she wants to. Similarly, though Serafina
is deeply in love with her husband, part of Stigma’s tragedy
is that only in the degrading confines of the work camp does she feel
secure enough to confront her own desire for more from life than the role
of serving the men in her family. “I kept reviewing them like a
catechism: Poppa [her husband], Michael, Charles. People were the answer,
weren’t they? I looked outside myself and there you all were. Sometimes
I wondered what was inside, there just for me” (51).
Parenthood no less than sexual relations vexes the characters of these
stories. The husband and wife in Stigma, Joseph and Serafina,
spend as much time poring over their perceived failures as parents as
they do their failures to each other, and both wonder what they did or
didn’t do to their elder son to make him into a willing tool of
the state. Melhem hints that the wife’s overbearing father-in-law
played a role there, by pulling her away from her role as mother so she
can be the family’s maid. This is drawn to exaggeration when at
one point he angrily demands she cook dinner for him and Joseph rather
than breastfeed her son. Though it sounds maudlin, the conversations and
emotional tone of the scene are understated, and Melhem avoids neat explanations.
As Michael’s father thinks back from his prison cell, he recalls
that as an infant Michael “never” seemed “to stop crying,”
and never let his father hold him (5).
Though certainly the chauvinism and misogyny of these worlds plays a major
role in enabling the horrors we encounter, Melhem has much more at work
than a facile analysis of gender relations. The odd moments of sexual
pleasure and longing that surface throughout both stories are genuinely
troubling in the way they complicate and deepen her characters’
sense of agency, and this adds legitimacy to their plight. Even in the
midst of nightmarish conditions, characters never become two-dimensional
or predictable. In fact, human fallibility, desire, and pleasure remain
at the foreground of these two stories, making them as much an investigation
of how life can go on in the face of unmitigated horror as an unflinchingly
imaginative rendition of human misery. The tryst between the gunman and
the daughter in The Cave, or between Joseph and his cellmate
in Stigma, occur in ways and at times that seem implausible or
even frightening. Yet when Melhem narrates them, they seem all too real
and understandable.
These stories are certainly speculative, but Melhem’s fiction is
profoundly personal, and this is one of its greatest strengths. Her subjects
live under fascism or war, but the shifting perspectives she employs address
the workings of the social whole in oblique ways. We get only incomplete
information, unreliable signs of a world beyond the characters’
immediate reality, but that is enough to get us to think about the historical
forces which set the stage for those characters. This tension between
history and its subjects permeates these stories, making them provocative
and worth second and third readings. What is unsaid or only hinted at
becomes powerfully evocative, and the impact is unquestionable.
Review
by Victor Cohen
Los Angeles
victor.cohen37@gmail.com
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