Silent and noisy. We achieved that as a family every single day. We stacked bird cages in rickety towers in living rooms, until it looked, smelled and sounded like Madagascar – the movie that is. The screeches, hoots and whistles of dozens of species of exotic small birds would swell and top the voices speaking about politics, the only topic really worth sharing. A Motorhead take on debating. And, to plaster in between noises, we would play the radio at stadium level.
A wall of noise to ban silence. As if to drown in it.
To the extent that anyone else listening from outside in would find it odd at best. Disturbing was often said. A cacophony of life. The social contract of our family was the right to withdraw from our own backstories, chose what to pitch and contribute it to the blanket of noise. For that, we know each other’s depth, and know how and when to play the characters in some French, or maybe Italian, theatrical performance.
Never hiding, but also never really revealing ourselves.
That is and has always been the only workable way for a group to function, when its individual members know that its composition is, either by definition, function or destination, unstable. Components may swap frequently, to avoid any deep intertwining, so that the separation does not tear them and the group apart. That is what you find in international schools, expats circles, mercenaries and frontline soldiers. Or prospectors in the bush. When friends and colleagues possibly fade away every other year, emotional closeness is a liability.
And that is how we started operating as a family, as roles.
Not that we wished for it, it just seemed obvious, just something else we carried back in the trunks from Congo. A logical, rational, take on life itself. At least, for me, that is how it always felt. The individual duty to the laager, the group, the family. Do not dig that deep. People should just share as they wish, feel necessary or expedient. Do not get too attached. There are dogs for that. And cats. And birds. That is probably why we always have so many of them around; they are life. Sub-title: humans are not.
That and also the knowledge that every individual in there is more than what you know of them.
And to function optimally, nothing should be off the table out of necessity. No topic forbidden, no information hidden. It is necessary for the group to survive. We could talk about anything at any age. But we also had to accept that anyone, including ourselves, could decide to withdraw from the discussion, as a prerogative. My space, back off. Emotions only create line fractures, so are best kept in check. Anyone has them, it is true, we respect that. But they weaken the group.
Credible deniability as a mode of operation.
To go beyond what is shown, you only have imagination, deduction, and emotional intelligence, as you would call it in newspeak. And your personal sense of responsibility to the group. Even for a basic chronology, you had to rely on your own deductions. Cause and effect chains, possible. Motivation, guesswork. You go.
Just never question what someone has decided to share. It is simple respect.
When the family gathers, the facts are a few pictures displayed and shown, woven into safely rehearsed parables: “in those days, [name], your [role], in [location], [date] did … “. Historical thumbnails smoothened up into a cohesive story. Not always coherent, but soothing. And on the Friday evening, when your grandfather went to hunt… The story of a life as a succession of lessons; the Parable of the Bottle Opener, of playing with Mauser cartridges in the Ruins… and the evergreen Christmas Orange.
We share probably the last one story. Certainly not the others.
But this narrative can only implode when the raw material, the trunks, the albums, the artefacts resurface. A swarm of new dots to link. Memories that never existed and yet were just a few meters away. I should be used to it. Social media today empowers us to create an infinite numbers of dots to link and build our narrative. Yet only the sheer quantity of these dots is the novelty.
Pictures? What they mean and why we take them never changed.
I flip through photos that are 150, 100, or 50 years old. Paper and format changes, resolution improves. 1870s photos are less faded than 1970s ones. Written subtitles show yet another chronology – not a technological, but a humane one. Carefully written French cursives evolves into carefree squiggling subtitles: my great-grandfather, my grandmother’s, my mother, mine. Vocabulary changes too. But the audience remains the exact same.
The whole point of it remains the same. I want to remember. And share with you. I am living my best life.
Is it not the exact point of social media 200 years later? 200 years of photography, or millennia of paintings, still to shout the same. Flip over any of these old photos. Some were directly developed as postcards. They were never meant to be exclusive family heirlooms. They were messages. To convey what? And who else in the world received these pictures?
What did they want me or anyone to know?
Each photo, each letter, comment, is a symptom of Reality. If it actually exists, real life happens in between the stills. In the time gaps between the photos. The narrative, the bridges between them can only be discussed, whispered, hinted at. And if that does not happen, then it means we are not supposed to remember that gap, that shadow in time. Respect my decision to withdraw. Nothing nefarious. Just because I choose to.
And so silence creeps up in our family saga.
From 1928 until 1933, maybe a detail is misplaced, a location wrong, pictures failed, badly developed or over-exposed. But the visual narrative is tight: on the 10 April 1931, we leave camp Modja. Until we land on the 30th of June 1931 in Southampton. Then dated pictures turn from days to months, months into years. Until they slow down to a crawl. The subtitles become vague, stilted, uninterested: in the garden March 1933. With whom? Where? Distance. That’s where we lived. Not where we were.
And then silence falls. 1933 melts into 1934, 1934 stops in December 1935.
The pictures stutter, halt. Then suddenly, in December 1935, they start again. We start again. First erratically, then frantically: Marseille, Algiers, Dakar, Conakry, like a desperate thirst to record anything. And finally, like a sigh, deeper Africa, Kankan. The light, the colours are back. A life worth living. We made it, we are alive. And so we continue running: Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cameroon. Pictures snowball back into a reel, frames speed up, clickety-clack, one by one, then speed up to the purring clatter of an old B&W projector, back to a movie. And Life slowly comes back into focus again.
The frenzy of motion has drowned the silence.
That silence, these years, never truly left the family. That silence is as much a part of the family as Africa, machetes and trunks. It was never forgotten, nor hidden, nor blanked. It was just never spoken of. In 1933, at 30, it was time for my grandmother to settle and have a kid. Kids, if possible. My great-grandfather made sure she remembered in a letter. And yet, 2 years later they would be back running to Africa. The first child was born, Annie, only to be left behind in Belgium in an religious institution. Her health would not allow her to live in Africa, and even less on the trail.
A grievous wound to survive as a mother, a wife, a couple. An immense grief that never faded. A silence hiding behind the doors, hanging in the corners of the ceiling, watching from the edges of mirrors. That is the first thing total strangers would instantly tell me about my grand family: they left a child behind to go back. A decision never answered, never commented. Never complain. Never explain.
The motto: “That was a different era”. A silence in every moment. Never forgotten.
I will share pictures, hidden within the thickness of a cardboard cover, others hidden away in a sealed lead box. Maybe I will find a text somewhere. That is not urgent. There is the kid left behind. And there is the decision. How to talk about a crime, as we see it today? Is it my, our, responsibility to judge, comment, give our opinion? The decision has been done, the price paid, and exactly that became part of the fabric of the family. Decisions can only mean responsibility. Individuals make decisions, for their own reasons, and so the price is theirs to bear. Compassion, empathy? Of a sort.
The silence between the pictures never needed approval, judgement. It just was.
Why? Was it truly for health reasons? Was it just for convenience? The house was drab, the village not even worth a photo, social life dreary. That much was documented. The job was so underwhelming that nothing survives of it. A purgatory of patio barbecues and not-so-epic boar hunts around Bordeaux? Or did Suzanne and François, my grandparents, just flee the crowds as they both would years later from Nice?
Was it to salvage a marriage? Was it to preserve the future and overcome the disappointment of a sickly kid? They gave it a go, and they could have stayed in France. What would have happened, who would have died then, who would have been born?
Maybe someone thinks they have the answer to all that. I suspect it was never truly given.
The decision was never explained in details. I, at least, never felt the need to dig. Silence as respect for the burden of decisions and their price.
This is the living silence between the pictures that follow the family.
We reach a tipping point in the saga. Precise life dots only truly re-appear in December 1937, with my mother ‘s birth. And the narrative has turned 90 degrees, 10 years after my grandparents met. Exploration is paused and all eyes turn to the family. The laager closes in for the night.
But the silence falls. Always present. Never hidden.
In memory of Annie Françoise Dulière
Cauderan, 27 July 1933 – Watermael-Boitsfort, 8 January 1937
at Watermael-Boitsfort Cemetery, Brussels Capital Region,
of which me and my son are now custodians.
New photo and video material posted daily. Follow on Facebook and Instagram.
The post Loss of a Child, the Silence Between Pictures appeared first on MNOI.