killing innocence, again

There was no link between the child I was in Zimbabwe and the adult I was forced to become upon migration. I had to learn to speak again, from scratch, and when I did it came out as academic jargon. I had resorted to teaching myself from books, the only companions who were tolerant enough to bide with me until I’d figured enough things out. I still had the choking hesitation in my voice, of the strangled child, but I was fragile steps, little princess walking on a ground of swords steps, in order to assert myself and my perspectives.

Donald Meltzer, the psychoanalyst, says that those who murder their inner child develop a grave capacity for brutality against themselves and others. Mine wasn’t dead yet, and was doing her best to stay alive, but all was based on precepts from a different cultural paradigm, which I could not have dwelt in any more, due to my growing need for knowledge, even if a part of me had wanted to remain that innocent – to retain the innocence of a child indefinitely.

Yet the transition had to be harsh. The inner child, according to indications from those in the new culture I’d entered was a mean-spirited fascist. Consequently, my inductors into a new morality were helping her to die, bit by bit, and by attrition. Inner death, it seemed, was the pronouncement of justice to be meted out.

The Nazis, according to Meltzer, in his work, The Claustrum, would form a sense of solidarity within their group, on the basis of each murdering their own sense of childhood innocence. That is what gave them their evil but attractive allure, as well as their ability to do harm without the sensation of remorse. The Mau Mau, too, in Kenya, used to prepare themselves for war by brutalising themselves first. All pronouncements of death to the inner child are dangerous. My memoir is a way of finding the route back towards the sensitivities that had been lost during my struggle for survival.

I must admit, I reached a point where I was prepared to kill others with a feeling of impunity. After all, I reasoned calmly, they had done as much to me, and had wished even worse. Those who had thought I was condescending to them, just because I’d rounded out my vowels – so as to be understood – and had learned my language from several books, they were the people I wanted to die most of all. I would be there to help them to this destination, if at all possible – I would join the rabid armies of the right, I figured out. Such began a very short time, in my life, when I foolishly, but driven by the need to communicate viscerally the intellectually incommunicable sense of loss I had experienced, identified with right wing causes.