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English Department......
Dr. Galbus' Biography..
Dr. Julia Galbus
Sample of Public Scholarship
On December 16, 2003, National Public
Radio aired a piece by Susan Stamberg, part of a series the reporter is
doing on people’s sense of “home.” This was the response I sent to NPR.
One of my main areas of research and teaching is autobiography. It's
important to
listen
to Stamberg’s piece to understand the context of my essay.
Susan Stamberg’s piece
'No Place
Like Home': Reclaiming a 'Haunted' House inspired visceral anger
and sadness. Stamberg interviewed her neighbors in Washington D.C., author
Howard Norman and poet Jane Shore, to discuss how they repossessed their
sense of “home” after a tragedy. In July 2003, an “acquaintance” murdered
her son and then killed herself in their dining room while they and their
teenaged daughter spent the summer in Vermont.
No one in the conversation mentioned
anything of substance about the mother and child who lived and died there.
They were unnamed; the point of the story was how it affected their
connection to their house. The writers were wealthy enough to spend summer
away. Was this “acquaintance” a housesitter? A renter? Was the
gesture to permit her to live in their home a favor, or some kind of
charity? What were the circumstances that led her to live with a child in
their home? Nothing was mentioned about the mother’s pain, or what caused
her to need a place to stay, or whether she had a husband or the child a
father. Did they rent it to her to make some extra money? Did they know
she was troubled?
Shore said they asked themselves, “Can
we live in the house? Because the house was violated.” A child’s life
was violated. A woman committed suicide. Shore said “It had been visited
upon” them, and that they should not let a “demon” chase them out. Norman
explained, it’s "not that you don't want to empathize but . . . it's not
our story" and that you must “objectify and separate yourself from the
situation,” and that doing so has “an ethical dimension.” They drop the
name of their playwright friend David Mamet, who had relayed a Jewish
saying about not wishing tragedy on someone else, and he suggest that if
they comport themselves with dignity when reclaiming their house, they
will come out intact. Instead, they are without tact and empathy for the
people to whom they had opened their home.
How dignified is it to worry about
recovering belongings and then to broadcast it? Norman reclaimed the
dining room where the mother and child died by spending the night typing
letters to friends there. Shore wonders if she can use the dead woman’s
things. Stamberg mentions an image from one of Shore’s poems, a bar of
soap with thick black hair on it, as if Shore’s red hair would be tainted
by the foreign hair belonging to the dead woman. Shore compares her home
to her body. If her simile works, then why doesn’t she feel like some part
of her died with the woman? She describes the "gruesomeness of what
happened in their own normal space." These neighbors are different from
the woman who briefly lived in their house. They are normal. They find a
sense of relief that the house still feels like it is theirs.
A family returns from vacation wanting to
feel “at home” again. They can identify with the human agony or set
themselves apart. They choose distance. Perhaps there is no place like
home. Perhaps their home will never be quite the same. But the larger
issue, to me, is the confusion of home with objects, and the interview’s
focus on things used to avoid acknowledging the souls that died by the
living with whom they share space.
The Washington Post published the
story about the murder-suicide in July.
Reetika Vazirani published two
collections of poetry: World Hotel and White Elephants. She
was born in India but raised in Maryland, had thick black hair, a son who
was two, and a partner who had won a Pulitzer prize. She murdered the
child and died in somebody else’s house. She never found her home.
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