“All this time I’ve been so excited for nothing, I knocked on my parents’ door in my dreams many times and waited for them to open, I expected my story to be accepted, to be accepted, let in and I was disappointed, I was sad, I stood on the threshold and knocked on their door, then I stopped nocking, I stopped hoping, I turned my back and left, in a way I was free.”
A story of liberation from the family institution told by Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth in his novel Heritage (Arv og miljo). He is also urging the reader to take sides over family relationships when it comes to child sexual abuse. The experience the author, in his fifties, put at the heart of his novel is the sexual abuse he suffered by his father from the age of five to seven.
The best part of why he wrote the book was a comparison by his friend Bo, who wrote articles on world wars; “…nothing had changed after Bo wrote in the newspaper, but he said what the philosopher said, not to convince those who disagreed with him, he wrote because those who agree with him should know that they are not alone.” This is where I look and take strength in my fight against sexual abuse. That those who agree with me shouldn’t feel alone.
The novel begins with the death of the father;
“My father died five months ago, the timing was either very good or very bad, depending on where you looked at it. I don’t think he’d mind going so suddenly, so when I first heard about it, I thought he must have thrown himself out on purpose when I hadn’t learned the details yet. His death was more reminiscent of surprise endings in novels than an accident.
In the previous weeks, when my father was alive, my brothers had a big fight over how to share the inheritance, it was about the family’s cottage in Hvaler. Just two days before my father fell, I stood with brother against my sisters.”
These lines remind me of my father’s death. Because Bergljot siding with his older brother Bard was a harbinger of a major crisis. Bergljot, who had not seen family members for more than two decades until before his father’s will, contacted the family after the unfair distribution of the will and stood by Bard, who objected to the will.
In my story, I met with my relatives years later when my uncle called the heirs so my father wouldn’t sell the last house he had left. No one was asking why we didn’t see our relatives, why we weren’t like a family. No one saw that the children were abandoned. They were answering that question themselves that they didn’t ask us. “The children are very tempered and unstable…” No questions were asked why the children were tempered and unstable.
As with Bergljot’s story, when I inadvertently tried to get involved in the inheritance, I, too, exposed my father. About six months after the revelation, my father committed suicide. We didn’t understand the cause of death like Bergljot’s father because he killed the woman he was with. “It was like a surprise ending in a novel.”
On the day the will is announced, which is revised after his father’s death, Bergljot decides to confront all family members. His previous attempts to confront have been thwarted. “It hurt me, and still hurts me that none of you got up and asked what was the matter with me.” This message he wrote to his sister is drowned out by silence like any other attempt. And his sister, a human rights activist. Two years after the publication of Vigdis Hjorth’s novel, his sister Helga Hjorth, a human rights activist, launches a novel called Free Will, in which she tries to protect her parents by claiming that her sister is a dishonest narcissist. Because now there’s no way she can drown Vigdis’s novel in silence anymore. Mother, Inger Hjorth da, sues the group that adapted the Heritage novel for £23,000 in damages.
Vigdis gives the best answer to family members who did not believe in her and declared war on her by describing a show by the performance artist Marina Abramovic in her novel;
“Seventy-two different objects were lined up on a long table., a feather, a pistol, a chain, a rose, a video of the six-hour performance was being posted on the wall behind the table. The audience standing in front of the table could use these objects on Marina Abramovic, do what they wanted to her with the objects; The artist would just stand there for those six hours, accepting and understanding whatever was tried on her: She wanted to see what the audience was going to do. The audience was calm and reserved at first, they waited for her to start, but she didn’t start. Then one approached vaguely, then another, the third broke the proximity boundary, another got even closer, the next one touched her, then they started to get bolder; they ripped off her blouse, they provoked each other, they fueled each other’s recklessness, they started to become dangerous: Someone took the shattered blouse off her back, they humiliated her, they got very aggressive. Her passivity, and perhaps therefore her strong presence, provoked them. Someone handed her a gun and put the tip to her head and whispered ‘shoot’. When the performance was over, when the clock rang, Abramovic moved, finally, she took a step towards the audience, viewers strained in fear and disgust: “They couldn’t stand me for what they did to me. “
Bergljot’s mother is the character we are most angry with in the novel. Maybe because she was the only one who could protect the child. The mother knows from the very first moment what her daughter is going through, but she never brings it up. She brings it up for the first time when she thinks about breaking up with her husband so she can be with her boyfriend: “Are you sure your father didn’t do anything to you?” As a woman of chastity, she needs such a bullet to divorce her husband. Bergljot’s experiences are covered up again when the mother’s lover doesn’t think about ending his own marriage and continues to be used as leverage to protect her relationship with her lover against the father. (I, too, felt it: I was the victim of a quiet agreement between my parents. But I didn’t know what kind of deal it was.)
When Bergljot is 15, sexual abuse is still unspoken, but her mother gives her a book. Tove Ditlevsen’s “Evil Was Done to a Child”. Mother fears her daughter, who she knew was sexually abused but didn’t protect her, will become addicted to drugs or obsessed over sexuality. She puts a lot of pressure on Begljot during her youth, as if a disaster will happen to her. As if Bergljot hasn’t gone through a disaster alrady!
For her mother, Bergljot’s role in the family is hard to understand. When Bergljot rushes to give her mother the good news during her first pregnancy, her mother lies that she is pregnant, too. Then she asks Bergljot to keep her boyfriend Rolf’s letters… Bergljot is a rival to her mother. Maybe that’s why Berglijot da sees her mother as a rival, too.
Bergljot decides to face what she’s been through;
“What does it look like to be a healthy person?
I didn’t know what it was like to be healthy, to be uninjured; I had nothing but my own experiences.”
Although the analyst says the therapy process will turn her life upside down;
“… he said analysis could change my life, shatter my relationships and risk severing my ties, I understand that he was warning me, but everything was already ruined, there was nothing else to lose.”
When she decides to confront her family, she receives the response that she should be prepared to lose her family if she confronts her parents from the Incest Support Centre. “… ninety percent of those who confronted their parents lost their families…”
When she hesitated to confront her family and fled herhome town, when she let herself down on a bank tired in San Sebastian, his friend Klara – her friend who reminds me of the character Mug in The Festen – catches up; “… what you need to understand is that this isn’t a tea party, it’s a war, war of life or death, no peace talks here, there is a life-and-death struggle to save your honour and be well remembered…” She stood upright like a warrior from the bench where she collapsed crying.
It’s no longer possible for her to live her life as if nothing had happened. For this, she has to face his family;
“…I wondered if they believed that everything can be started over as if the story never existed, even though we know that history cannot be denied, as all wars in the world have revealed, that history can be denied, deleted, that it can be swept under the carpet, if you intend to reduce the destructiveness of history over the future everyone’s understanding of history should be discussed and accepted…”
Not facing it is self-betrayal.
Vigdis Hjorth leaves the novel open-ended. She leaves it to us…
Even though I regret to have met a woman who had reborn herself through literature, the fact that we are struggling because of similar traumas, it’s a consolation that we’re standing, that we’re not alone. I’m glad you talked about it, Vigdis Hjorth! You gave me strength, you created different awarenesses in me. I hope you’ll empower other victims and heal them.