Briseis speaks

[dolorosa_12]

This evening, there will be an event which bills itself as a 'Eurovision pre-party', with a lineup including past and current contestants. Matthias and I will be watching, and if anyone else is interested in doing the same, the event is viewable online. More details here.

On to today's book prompt:

21. A book written into your psyche



There can be no answer here other than Pat Barker's extraordinary, devastating The Silence of the Girls, which is the Iliad retelling that I had been searching for my entire life. In my time I have read so many lacklustre Iliad adaptations, seeking a single thing: a story that gives the women (and in particular, my favourite, Briseis) their voice, and condemns the men around them for the violence and ruin that their honour culture and endless war has wrought. I don't want a book that turns the women into twentieth- or twenty-first-century feminists, and I don't want a book that tries to redeem the male characters and turn the Iliad into a love story. What I have always wanted, in fact, is The Silence of the Girls.

Rather than try to recap everything I love about the book, I am going to link to my review of it from several years ago, which you can find on my reviews blog. It's a long review, but the salient point is this:

There are so many moments of devastating power in Barker’s brilliant story that it’s hard to select just a few to give an impression of the narrative. There’s the point, early on in the book, where Briseis (at this point the young wife of a petty king of a city allied to Troy) is trapped, waiting a battle’s outcome with the other women of the palace, knowing that defeat in the battle will mean rape and enslavement, and she realises that all the slave women hiding with her have already experienced this at the hands of her husband and male relatives. There’s her constant focus, once captured, on Achilles’ moods and hands and body; like all women trapped in a situation of domestic violence, she has to maintain a state of constant vigilence to minimise the harm done to her and ensure her reactions to volatile male tempers don’t spark life-threatening brutality. There’s the scene where Priam — having slipped into the Greek camp to plead with Achilles for his son Hector’s body, and kissed Achilles’ hands in an attempt to persuade him — carries on as if this act of kissing were the greatest sacrifice and humiliation imaginable (something ‘no man has ever done before’), and Briseis reflects scathingly on the ubiquity of what she, and all women affected by war, have been forced to endure. It’s so ubiquitous that it goes entirely unremarked and unnoticed, like something of the fabric of the world.

At the same time, Barker focuses relentlessly on the resilient, fractious, messy community of captive women that has sprung up in the Greek camp over the ten years of the Trojan War. The war itself is essentially a half-seen backdrop: the real action takes place in the laundry tents, weaving huts, and at the edges of racous warriors’ feasts, where women circulate, pouring wine. All find different ways to cope with their situation: some force themselves to fall in love with their captors, or try to persuade one captor to fall in love with them, because one rapist is easier to endure than a whole camp of them. Others take refuge in maintaining a pretence of respectability, remaining secluded, weaving cloth, and only venturing outside when wearing veils, as if behaving like proper married matrons will convince the world that nothing has changed in their status. Briseis’ technique is to remain hypervigilent, not just to the mood in her own tent, but within the camp as a whole — and in this she is aided by the network of captive women, who move about unnoticed, slipping into spaces where they can pick up news with ease, and spreading it rapidly around to their fellow captives. Briseis is well aware that her only power is to be prepared: to know what is being done to her before it happens. She cannot avoid the blows, but she can brace herself for when they fall.

I try to reread this book annually, because it has, as the prompt suggests, written itself into my psyche. Stories of women who experience trauma and find ways to carve out community, selfhood, and humanity within the darkness and ruins are my very favourite, and this one is among the best I've ever encountered.


22. A warm blanket of a book

23. A book that made you bleed

24. A book that asked a question you've never had an answer to

25. A book that answered a question you never asked

26. A book you recommend but cannot love

27. A book you love but cannot recommend

28. A book you adore that people are surprised by

29. A book that led you home

30. A book you detest that people are surprised by