Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

Lest We Remember
Carolyn Polizzotto, A Trick of the Light. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2001.
Reviewed by Tania Oost.
A Trick of the Light is the memoir of Australian-born Carolyn Polizzotto that
pieces together a hard-won recollection of her postwar childhood in the 1950s.
It is interesting as a memoir because its point is what cannot be recalled about
one's life, and why. She candidly reveals that there is much in her childhood
which she is unable to remember (and in fact much of what she writes is
second-hand information from her parents). Near the beginning of the book she
asks: 'Why is there a gap where my childhood should be?' (27) Her memoir is an
exploration of this question and an attempt to redeem her childhood memories.
Her thinking about her lack of memory takes an existential turn and it is a
pleasure to read her unique take on how her consciousness and memory were
shaped in relation to language and silence.
Polizzotto's childhood was dominated by a war that was never spoken about but that pervaded family
life. She recalls that 'war was all around me and the fact that it was not spoken of made it more real, not
less' (21). Her father had served in the Australian navy in World War Two and returned home with posttraumatic
stress disorder. His disorder was not acknowledged, however, and he dealt with his trauma
through silence and withdrawal. Interestingly, while specific references to her father are infrequent and
peripheral in Polizzotto's memoir, his influence within her story, as with his influence over his family in
the 1950s, is heavy and sombre. While he is mostly absent throughout these pages, the sense that the
reader gets of his pervasive effect over the family is all the more powerful, and is skilfully invoked by
the author.
Polizzotto's father remained silent and withdrawn, and her mother dealt with him in a similarly evasive
way. Polizzotto recalls her as always whispering to the children, shooing them out of the way and
tiptoeing around her volatile husband. In this way her mother seemed to fade away, to lose herself to
her husband's problems. Polizzotto, too, was deeply affected by her father's moods and by the
oppressive atmosphere in the household. She recalls that she was always nervously attuned to her
father's state of mind. Fear and tension were an everyday undercurrent that she took to be normal.
Ritual and superficial pleasantries were necessary to disguise underlying problems and to suppress a
truth which threatened to surface at any moment - that perhaps the war was not justified, that there
were no real victors, or that, in the minds of these generations, it was not over.
Polizzotto explains that this silence was used to raise a new generation of children with a clean slate -
that is, the children were the clean slate. She believes that her generation functioned as a language,
giving meaning and justification to the war:
we and all our generation were the currency of the 1950s. We were our
parent's lost innocence. Their teens and twenties, gone to war, were set to be
our future. With us the speculators bought and sold land, orchards, cars and
fridges. We were the reward of war and our happiness was the price of
peace. The fifties? We were its language. (56)
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