HYPERTEXT MAGAZINE ASKED NATALIE SINGER, AUTHOR OF THE MEMOIR CALIFORNIA CALLING: A SELF-INTERROGATION, “WHAT QUESTION DO YOU WISH YOU’D BEEN ASKED ABOUT YOUR WORK?”
Question: What’s with all the questions in the book, and who is the interrogator in your story?
Answer: I write early on in California Calling that I have a complex relationship with interrogation—a personal and ancestral history of being subjected to questioning by those who have power over my or my family’s lives.
The sharpest point of that history is a memory I have of being a witness in a courtroom when I was a teenager. I went onto the witness stand confident, feeling like I would set the record straight. What happened there instead changed the rest of my girlhood and has haunted me since.
For a long time, I didn’t know why the recurring memory of this courtroom, with me as a teenage girl on the witness stand, a thin flash of memory vivid but also vague, stood out to me. It came back constantly. On the witness stand I was made to answer for my mother’s and female ancestors’ sexual transgressions, for my parents’ teenage love and my own sexuality, for patriarchy and for the patterns, chosen and forced, that moved my people across borders for centuries.
The memory of this courtroom become stuck in the center of all my thinking. The experience, and what happened after, pushed me fully into a type of silence that I have come to think of as the silence of girlhood.
Yet it was 20 years of flashbacks before I could begin to conceive of that moment on the witness stand, and some of the moments before it, as exploitations, and to constellate them among other moments and interrogations that formed a truth about my world over which I had no control.
(Incidentally, my fixation on a repetitive flash of memory is, it turns out, ordinary. A traumatic event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, Cathy Caruth tells us, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it: To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event. Although living through trauma exposes the traumatized person to a seemingly unbearable degree of isolation, Caruth argues, the very act of surviving trauma entails discovering new ways of relating and being related to others.)
I began to feel like my book should ask, not only with its content but with its form: How can we speak again after a silencing?
I wondered whether form could be a response to silence. Interrogation is an experience, a scaffold, which for me stretches back into ancestry, into the experiences of women before and around me.
In speech act theory, performative utterances not only describe a given reality but, in enacting the thing they say, change the reality described: “I promise.” “I do [take you to be my wife].” “I swear.” “I testify.” Shoshana Feldman tells us that testimony is one of the most viable responses to trauma, and that by bearing witness, we can become mediums to transmit truth.
I wanted to write a book that would perform a critical response to the interrogations and traumas it discussed, to implement at times a type of performative utterance that would return voice to a space of silence. I wanted, finally, to respond to the state of being silenced and to counter certain myths (the myth of the perfect family, for instance). To respond to a forced testimony that failed, I felt I had to testify, in my book, under my own terms.
I use the language of interrogation—the language of police investigations, cross-examinations, and other authoritative structures of questioning—to construct intimate and sometimes intrusive inquiries into events and memories. Many chapter titles are posed as questions―all pointed, some antagonistic, some intimate. The narrative answers these questions, or doesn’t, as a means of recalibrating power structures and reclaiming voice.
As for who is asking the questions, that’s not something I can explain here. It’s for the reader to think about, and the answer is likely not the same for everyone. Because we all have our own histories, “truths” and myths to interrogate.
Natalie Singer is the author of the new memoir California Calling: A Self-Interrogation (Hawthorne Books, March 2018). Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in journals, magazines, and newspapers including Proximity, Literary Mama, The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, Alligator Juniper, Brain, Child and Full Grown People. She has taught writing inside Washington State’s psychiatric facility for youth and Seattle’s juvenile detention center, and she has worked as a reporter at newspapers around the West. Natalie earned her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington. Originally from Montreal, she lives in Seattle. You can find more of her writing plus events and updates at nataliesingerwrites.com, at @Natalie_Writes, and at on Facebook.
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