book review
My Sister’s Father & Testimonial Literature
by Antonio Delgado, Ph.D.
Christine Gardiner’s poems unravel an oblique narrative of deception and oblivion toward a reality in which there is no moral to the story and no sense of healing beyond the writing process itself. The story is personal, but at the same time, the truth is kept at a distance, as if running away from its revelation. My Sister’s Father operates in a tradition of testimonial literature; however, it is not content to embrace the trauma but instead challenges and resists the experience. Other poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé have challenged the redemptory assumption of testimonial literature, but where Mallarmé’s poems to his son, Anatole, bring him closer to the lost child, Christine Gardiner’s poems create a distance within the omniscient knowledge of how the surrounding circumstances dissect the constant ending of filial relationships. Thus, the more the poems weave the story, the more they unweave the conception of psychoanalysis celebrated in society as handed down by the Old Testament God’s cultural dictums.
The Old Testament-father-figure has been immortalized by Kafka’s letter to his father. For Gardiner, on the other hand, the father is not only an authoritarian figure but also a figure of contemporary financial deception, “Our father bets two hands dealt the absent players, / and Money calls his bluff. I know the flush corrupts, / but if our father does not win, I will be punished.” He is also everywhere among the ruins, “He cultivates his absence in the presence of / a walled city by falling walls.” At the same time, the memories of him are brought into the present in a dislocated place. In this case, memories of what is being said and unsaid are always located outside the realm of understanding and language. On “a plate / ruptured along the fault lines / of speech planned but failed.” Hence, the threat of not forgetting the possibilities or future echoes the Kafkaesque implication of a future that will never arrive since “Tomorrow is a contract that expired.” At the same time, the text suggests the Beckettian paradox of Endgame when the narrator explains, “When I ask how will it end? It has ended already.”
In My Sister’s Father, the past is never fully realized. It lingers in its uncertainty throughout the present and the future towards “not the fiction of a future nor our mutually funded sorrow.” Throughout the poems, the past inhabits domestic and common places, “when you have gone room by room through your volume of memories, / when you have searched every revelation for clues but found none.” Many rooms for the speaker and her sister, for the voices that populate displaced spaces in search of memories that cannot be found because they no longer exist or because they never existed. The present also creates an exasperation of the theatre-image imprinting images based on recurrent places that continue to change the same way language changes—like the “sound of a corridor, drowned out by the sound of the train.”
Gardiner’s use of poetic voice(s) throughout the poems is not the simple doubling of the same character, but the expression of the multiplicities that inhabits it (them). References to mirrors and seeing herself as other are present as a poetic tool instead of a psychological symptom. Thus Gardiner works as an archaeologist of the mind, who pens different times across different snapshots of the same character with a constant tension between the self and playing her double. For her, the vastness of the world shrinks into a reality populated by vertigo and the fear of recognizing and embracing oneself on the image created for the outer world. However, there is no real mirror but a mask: a new persona dissociated from the common understanding of the displacement of time and space created by the constant vertiginous chaos that she does not try to organize but to experience as the only option to act as part of the family structure.