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'

Dr Who and Children through Time

Dr Who and the Child in Time

I’ve been a Dr Who fan since my own childhood, hiding behind cushions and, I remember once, peaking from just inside the kitchen door, fearful of even being in the same room as whatever monstrous creation was being shown (but not wanting to turn off and miss the story completely).

A 2014 Dr Who episode made an interesting reference to our ingrained, culturally inherited fears and the way they collect around the figure of a lost child. Episode 10, 'In the Forest of the Night', written by the author and scriptwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce, began with a schoolgirl running through forest as if pursued. Significantly, she was wearing a red hooded coat so we were deliberately drawn to the tales of 'Little Red Riding Hood'. 

There were several other references to this during the programme, particularly the appearance of wolves, and also to ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (the girl leaving a trail of items from her school bag, rather than breadcrumbs, to allow the Doctor to follow). London, and the whole world, had been covered overnight with forest and the Doctor realised (of course) that this was to protect the world from being annihilated by a solar flare. Of most interest to me was the Doctor’s assertion at the end that this had happened before but the human race had forgotten, except to immortalise the feelings of fear, putting them into 'fairy stories'. The Doctor describes forgetting as 'the human super power', without which we wouldn't 'go to war or make babies'. At the climax of the story, the girl in the red coat goes home to be reunited with her sister who had gone missing, prompting the hearing of voices and visions of the future.

A lot of my research is looking in to why the figure of the lost child is so often the centre of stories of fear, even to the point of our whole world being torn apart. Of course, any real lost child is a tragedy which must be agony for those that suffer it. The first series of BBC drama The Missing, about the abduction of a child, has as its tagline 'Every parent's worst nightmare'. And dramatists, writers, TV and film makers all clearly know that they tap into this psychological darkness - and that because of that many will not turn away but turn on. I believe there is more than just a parent's fear of being parted from their child in the constant manifestations of lost children. In a similar way to the Doctor (stick with me on this), I think that the 'lost child' is one of those archetypes which dwell within us, are passed down through a sort of collective memory or, if nothing else, is passed through time in the stories we tell, from the oral tales that Hansel and Gretel and Red Riding Hood wandered out of, to the image-laden, noisy narratives of now.

The lost child figure is bound up with our thoughts about birth and procreation (not surprisingly) but is also intrinsic to how we think about death and war. Like Doctor Who it is also about time - futures possible but curtailed, pasts forgotten or re-created - as the good Doctor suggested, the human race is good at forgetting, forgetting the really profound, burying it deep. How else to explain that, until recently, the British public had no idea about the centuries-old practice of Child Migration, where hundreds of thousands of children were parted from their families and sent to live in horrific conditions in far away colonies? or to explain the silence surrounding the thousands of children who go missing every year, a silence which also surrounds the incredibly loud furore over a few highly-publicised cases (why them and not the others?) If we care so deeply how do we allow children to be lost on a daily basis?

http://www.childmigrantstrust.com/our-work/child-migration-history