Ryan

Before the interview with Ryan at Derrycarrick began, I was told to be sensitive with Ryan, as his father was in jail in Belfast for having taken an active part in a sectarian murder.

Ryan was a quiet, slim, shy boy. He was quite polite and soft spoken. He gave me the impression of someone timid. The interview was in two parts; the first part consisted of the interview protocol. I had noted his comments about his father during the interview. Ryan simply said his father was in prison and now his mum drove a taxi. He said that they used to go once a month to see his dad.

L.R. What did he say to you?

R. To be good, not to give me mum any trouble.

L.R. Do you know why he is there?

R. No.

L.R. So, no one has ever said, why...

R. No.

L.R. Do you miss him?

R. Yes, I think he will come home after a long time, maybe when I am 16 or 17.

When I asked him if he ever got in trouble he said, “Sometimes.” He tried to be good. He said he sometimes got in trouble with the teacher, or had fights. He was not more forthcoming and I didn't press as him as I was conscious of his background. However, to my surprise, when the interview ended, he asked me if I could help him.

L.R. Help you, how, what would you like me to help you with?

R: With my sad spot.

L.R. Your sad spot.

R. Yes.

L.R. Where is it? Is it in a particular place?

R. (He nodded.)

L.R. Can you show me?

R. (He pointed to an area just under and to the left of the heart.) There. I have to work very hard keeping it there, keeping it small, or else it grows.

L.R. What happens when it grows?

R. It fills me all over and then I start crying and I can't stop.

L.R. Does that happen very often?

R. Every night.

L.R. Do you tell your mum?

R. Yes.

L.R. What does she say?

R. She says I have to get on with it. I have to stop.

L.R. Do your sisters know?

Yes. They just say I have to get on with it.

L.R. What do you do then?

R. I sit in my room in the dark and I cry. I don't come down.

L.R. Does your teacher know?

R. No. I'm afraid to tell her. She yells at someone sometimes in the class and, even though it isn't me she's yelling at it starts to grow, and I have to spend all my time keeping it small so it doesn't grow in class.

L.R. Does she yell at you?

R. No, but sometimes I get in trouble because I haven't done my work or been able to hear what we are supposed to do.

L.R. Then what happens?

R. Then it is worse.

L.R. What else makes it worse?

R. Well, I hate yelling and loud noise... and

L.R. Do you fight?

R. Sometimes. I have to.

L.R. How do you feel about that?

R. Well, sometimes I get in trouble and then I get worse and it gets worse, the spot. It's always there.

L.R. What would you like to happen?

R. [He looks up quickly.] Go away. If I could go away, far away from here, where no one knew me. To New York or somewhere in America, or to... Australia.

L.R. Do you think you'll do that when you're older?

R. I hope so... I want to be far away, far away from here.

L.R. Do you think it would help if I said something to your teacher... would you let me say something?

R. (He nods.)

I tell Ryan that he can speak to me anytime he likes... he nods. I pause and tell him that his teacher and the principal have my telephone number and that if he wants to talk to me any time I am here, he can. I ask how he feels now. “A little better,” he says.

I tell the headmaster at Derrycarrick, as soon as the interview is over, that I am worried about Ryan, and why, as Ryan has given me permission to talk to him. Mr. Poldark is somewhat incredulous. Ryan's sister works near the school and has never mentioned this. He goes to check. He returns to me shortly afterwards, clearly troubled. The sister has just told him that Ryan cries himself to sleep most nights, often rocking back and forth saying that no one loves him.

The sister had thought that this was just normal behavior... She says that to me as well later that day.

Two weeks later I see Ryan at an overnight camp with the rest of his class. He is happy, scrambling over rocks. He comes rushing up and says he feels a little better. Mr. Poldark needs him to help him fish so he's going to go with Mr. Poldark and help him fish. Soon.

Mr. Poldark nods. He has often taken a personal interest in particular children. Ryan now has someone just for him... at least for now. It is hard for me to think of Ryan without grief. One aspect of further worry is that the mother has stopped going to Belfast to visit the father and rumor has it that she has a boyfriend. Mr. Pollock is worried that this also troubles the boy.

Ryan's spot, or site of psychic and corporal pain, moves. He needs to place his hand upon it, “to keep it small.” It needs the warmth of his hand, his humanly created warmth to deactivate and firmly situate “the sad spot” into a bodily region. It acts on its own. It overwhelms. He could be overwhelmed, again, in public. This is the site where he recognizes the mass of feeling within him, where it gathers. Just there. When he can control it, he has a measure of safety.

Unlike Myles, Ryan is recognized by the system as connected to trauma. But his connectedness is not a relationship of sanction, one of protection, overall pity, and support. He has a conflicted presence...his father is a political prisoner, or a murderer. To some, the father can be seen as an active part of resistance to oppression, or as a destroyer. The son, as a symbol of the father, is marked by the father's positioning. That marking brings Ryan into public gaze, not as a child, but as a child representing the action of belief and retribution. He is held in that gaze as a consequence and inheritor— “sometimes the boys, they tease me.”

L.R. What do they tease you about?

R. They try to make me fight. And, if I do, then, then I'm just like m'dad and if I don't, then I'm a sissy.

Ryan is placed or symbolically replaced in the community as if in a trial of training to take his father's role—a logic of replacement. Can this human be the other human? Who Ryan is, the child that is Ryan and how he feels—where he is in finding a self that can cope with the extraordinary experience of which he is a tangential part through biological connection—is not the subject of the community discourse. Ryan's experiences offer a false binary—his father's role or that of the sissy. As the one human took on the role of executioner or avenger, here is another of his blood, a creature object like him, “like father, like son.”

Nemeroff and Rozin (1994: 158) present the “magical law of contagion” as a natural human response. This theory maintains when people come into contact with people or objects that are stigmatized, or in this case set apart, that through a magical influence there is a transfer of the properties that acts almost as contagion. This is especially important when considering a vital connection. That which is inside, and presents a danger or attraction, can move outside and penetrate an inside without being seen. It can even move from an external outside object to contaminate an inside.

Mary Douglas (1992) points out that deciding what is an object and distinguishing that object from a context cannot be taken for granted. In Ryan's case, the object blurring moves from the act committed by Ryan's father into the body and personality of the son—does the son become the father? Is the son reduced to his biological connectedness, an over-determined sign of the father's act?

Ryan's own body begins its insidious rejection of the false binary opposition—the sad spot is not “of the father,” is not part of the “just get on with it” modus operandi that orchestrates the acceptable ranges of responses in the housing estate. Ryan cannot even control the sad spot—it operates as a seemingly automatic rejection of the object blurring, it asserts a dangerous difference and reduces the eleven-year-old to a crying, rocking, wounded child at night.

But who can hear him? What self does he have that can participate in opening the debate? Where can he safely explore growth and experiment with role or career? In his case, a stranger, a not-member, accidentally opened the thirdspace placement, the place where Ryan lived out his fears and pain—the possibility that Ryan wanted an “other” life, but one that he did not know how to make in the everyday world of acts and consequences. In his imaginary life, his space of safety, he would escape to a far away world, a place where his inheritance as “the son of...” was not known, a space where his body could be his again—his own self-structuring and where he could be the determiner of his being. While at his school, Derrycarrick, Mr. Poldark offered to open the line of possibilities available for Ryan. The pathways that appeared to lead into either emotional deadening or despair seemingly, for this time, may have been avoided (Terr 1990).

Where do we begin to move away from children? How do we all quickly move into “othering” and distancing ourselves so that we find the ability to resist knowing about trauma that is happening? And, when do we find the time, the place, and the energy to break the social sanctions of “interference” to be able to ask the questions that open the opportunities for resistance, witnessing, and change?

I transcribed the field notes and did much of the background reading for this project while I was in Western Australia collecting data there. One afternoon, driving home after having a lengthy visit with a dedicated school psychologist who had introduced a modified anger management program for the children in that school, I listened to the Prime Minister of Australia being interviewed on the national radio station. He was being questioned about policies he was presenting to Parliament, which would entail cutting current funds for lower income families and educational projects.

The gist of the Prime Minister's commentary was that it was time for low-income families and people in depressed economic areas to take charge of their lives.

I wondered how the children would fare with even fewer support systems. It was not that these children, or Ryan or Myles, had an identity to reframe or resituate into larger, welcoming communities. Instead, many children are reduced to holding on, using much of their energy simply to maintain what ideas of self they can grasp, instead of seeking the challenge of developing out into life.

The children need the social flow of active people who have the time and energy to encourage and support a possible emergent self into a being that holds and claims a sense of humor, curiosity, adventure, and that recognizes tenacity. Although, right now, these children need us, in not too many years we will need Myles and Ryan to determine the shape of their adult years for themselves. I have no answers, only the narratives of children who attempt to make meaning of and adjust into a family, located in a particular community. It is difficult enough for children to sort out the confusing messages of the adult world without having to withstand the dangers of situated and established modes of violence. I was struck by the thought that I could provide any number of actual empirical examples that would easily demonstrate the dangers of that current government’s policy but that all too often, the theory behind the policy that shapes what happens to children is more important than the people the policy affects.

References

Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Translated from the Russian by Vem W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Burgess, T.P. (1993). A Crisis of Conscience. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

Linde, Charlotte. (1993). Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. London: Oxford University Press.

Rogers, Linda, Susan A. Tucker, and Marcel Danesi. (1999) A forum for inter and trans- disciplinary discourse. International Journal of Applied Semiotics 1.1: 3-6. Ottawa: Legas Press.

Douglas, Mary. (1992). Objects and Objections. Toronto Semiotic Circle Monograph Series 9. Toronto: Toronto Semiotic Circle.

Nemeroff, Carol, and Paul Rosin. (1994). The contagion concept in adult thinking in the United States: Transmission of germs and of interpersonal influence. Ethos 22.2: 158-186.

Rogers, Linda. (1997). Field Notes from Three Schools, Northern Ireland, May-June, 1997. Unpublished document.

Soja, Edward. W. (1996). Thirdspace. Cambridge, England: Blackwell Publishers.

Terr, Lenore. (1990). Too Scared to Cry. New York: Basic Books.

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Source: Anderson M. (ed.). Cultural Shaping of Violence: Victimization, Escalation, Response. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press,2004. — 330 p.. 2004

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