IN FULL VIEW

Essays by Lily Brett, 1997

Lily Brett's literary productions reflect a dominant and singular fact: her obsession with an event that she did not experience directly but which, irrespective of that fact, shaped her life in ways she has still been trying to work out. Brett's writing has had its source, one could say, in her belated determination to face, and somehow come to terms with, the appalling reality of her parents' experiences during the Holocaust. Her writing has also been (perhaps above all) tied to her need to deal with the devastating effects she believes the event had on her mother in particular and on the ways these effects then came to be registered, both physically and psychically, in her as her daughter. Whether Brett is writing explicitly about herself and her parents or other members of her family, as in her poetry and in the collection of autobiographical essays In Full View, or whether she disguises herself as one of the protagonists in her collections of short stories and novels, what her works persistently thematize is the complex, conflicted, and ambivalent relationship she had with her mother, the traumatic effect this has had on Brett (and on her body in particular), and how all this is connected to the history of her mother's Holocaust experiences. What is also strongly thematized has been Brett's pervasive desire, of which the writing is itself a significant expression, to re-create the broken connections between herself and her mother. As her writing shows, Brett has attempted to do this through identifying with her mother's experiences both before and during the Holocaust.

The associative and conversational style that is the hallmark of Brett's writing suggestively links her literary productions to her long stints of psychoanalysis. In a similar way to what happens through the technique of free association in an analysis, her writings are able to convey to the reader the traumatic nature of the message that her mother must have transferred to her about her experiences during the Holocaust, a message that marked Brett and that has continued to live on, especially in her body. Something traumatic in the mother's history, both before and during the Holocaust, seemed always to have been at stake in the difficult relations between mother and daughter, and it is the legacy of that traumatic history that is the source of so many of the stories Brett has told in poetry, fiction, and autobiography of her experiences growing up as the child of Holocaust survivors. It would seem that what was apparently most indigestible about the Holocaust for her mother got itself written on Brett's body; thus, the body that Brett's writing puts on display for us in her writing functions as an unhappy memorial to that trauma. As Brett has said about her body: "I created this havoc within myself because of a complicated confluence of history and family. Death camps, starvation, greed, a beautiful mother who'd lost everything except her looks. It was a heady brew. I took my regular, symmetrical, attractive features, and I huffed and I puffed until I distorted myself and resembled somebody else."

Brett's writing testifies to how her body not only attempted to avoid resembling a mother whom she could not help but resemble physically but was also her unconscious defense against the anxiety she always experienced in face of a suffering that threatened to devour her whole. As she says in "I Wear Your Face," one of The Auschwitz Poems : "I wear the glare/you froze me with /…/ I wear your fear/with practised ease/pleasing you/I wear your face/and mother/the green witch howls behind it." And yet, her writing also testifies to a contrary desire. Against this desire to flee from the voracity of a mother's suffering, Brett's very writing becomes an attempt to perform the impossible: to undo miraculously with the use of words the losses suffered by her parents, to use her writing to stitch herself seamlessly to their histories, above all to the time and place of her mother's pre-Holocaust past when life, not death, seemed possible. This latter desire, and the fantasy it stages, to reconnect the link between daughters and mothers that Hitler severed, is constantly dramatized in Brett's works. "If/with/my white biro/I could string/some strong words/into a thread/I would spin/myself a cocoon/a second womb/and/gently/tuck us in together."

This fantasy of loving union in which Brett is connected to a past she did not live unfortunately also has something potentially deathly about it. The question such an impossible fantasy poses (so poignantly evoked in these lines: "When I am pickling and preserving, I am joined to the past. Joined to another time, another life; a life I was destined to live before Hitler intervened. I am in Lodz. I am joined to my mother. I am not just her Australian child. I am joined to a city and a time that was never mine") is how it can support a usable present and future, not only for Brett but also for others of the second generation that her literature speaks of and to.

—Esther Faye