The Hole in Language

'Do you know, Quinn, there isn't even a word for a parent who has lost a child? Strange isn't it? You would think, after all these centuries of war and disease and trouble , but no, there is a hole in the English language. It is unspeakable. Bereft.' (from Bereft by Chris Womersley 2012)

 The above, excellent, novel was brought to my attention by my friend Lola Herrero and it struck me as another powerful narrative involving a lost child. This has been the focus of my research for about 10 years - my wife berates me for being 'sick', and gets me some accusing looks by announcing my fascination in public.

But then again, Liz did create the image above. So...
(For more of Liz's art and writing, please see here: https://lizfroud.com/ )

 In this blog I will be discussing some of my ideas surrounding the lost child - why it pervades our culture, and has done for centuries, from folk tales such as Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel to modern books, plays, films and television series. In the cold, hard, material world our media often explodes with terror and anger on high-profile cases such as Maddie Macann and yet there are hundreds of thousands of lost children in Europe, not to mention the wider world, that receive no attention. Their loss is perhaps more desperate as shattered lives become silence.

And that brings me back to the quote at the top - the lost child is 'unspeakable', the lost child is silence. It is a quivering in our voice and a collective sigh when we can form no words, or the words we try to speak, or write, become utterly devoid of meaning. I think the lost child represents a void within language itself - a 'hole'.

I will write some more detail on this in later posts. I don't want to trivialise the very human, real tragedies surrounding every lost child - far from it. I think that by analysing the way we speak, write and represent lost children reveals huge amounts about our individual and collective psychologies and the traumas which crack our society. The Australian academic Peter Pierce wrote that his country is The Country of Lost Children (1999): he argues that the early settler narratives (fact and fiction) of children lost in the 'bush' were symptomatic of their anxiety in a new, foreign landscape. But Pierce admits himself that in the twentieth century, as the agents of child loss became human and urban, the anxiety was not restricted to one country. Geraldine Cousin, in her book Playing for Time, analysed British theatre productions between 1990 and 2005, noting a prevalence of stories about lost children alongside themes of fear and danger.

As our society is gripped by seemingly ever greater fears of terrorism, war and disease, the figure of the lost child is a symbol, a symptom but perhaps also can point us to how we should be repairing the holes...

For now, to end this first-born child of a blog as it enters the hole in language, I'll quote some more of Bereft:

'He shuddered to imagine all the children of the world left defenceless, abandoned by war or disease to fend for themselves. He pictured a crusading army of them storming over the land with Sarah at their head, seeking retribution from those who had failed them'