Women without men in Jane Rogers's Hitting trees with sticks

As I am walking home from the shops I pass a young girl hitting a tree. <…> …, and she is methodically and repeatedly whacking the trunk, as if it is a job she has to do. There is a boy who stands and watches her [Rogers 2012: 225].

Reading Jane Rogers’s collection of short stories Hitting Trees with Sticks will bring you closer to the puzzled world of females’ truths, revealed through their actions and emotions. Very often devoid of linguistic exquisiteness of expression, which is an intriguing feature of her style, the author portrays her characters with snapshot precision, which catches your imagination through witty and original images, associated in symbolic meanings and familiar platitudes. Paradoxically, as Arthur Conan Doyle put it, there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact . Banalities reveal complexity of truths. Playing with concepts Rogers makes the reader guess her intricate gambits from the very start and involves them into a drama full of negotiated contexts . The term used by Michael O’ Donnell seems appropriate to denote the dynamic nature of Jane Rogers’ narration and the demand on the reader’s participation in contextual modelling. According to Michael O’ Donnell, “Instances of prior discourse conditioning choice include: theme (which entities have already been introduced into the discourse?); reference (e.g., has the entity already been introduced?); nominalisation (the option to nominalise partially depends on the prior introduction of the fuller form, cf. Halliday 1988; Fuller 1996)” [O’Donnell 1999: 4]. In her stories, Jane Rogers excludes the first (theme) and plunges the reader into conflicting contexts through referencing from different points of view.

‘Red Enters the Eye’, which is the first story in the book, exploits the concept of the colour red to map the story’s contexts: beauty – weapon – crime – blood. The character of the story, Julie, motivated by So Sew Right magazine chooses red as a strong colour to share her

ideas in the essay, Accessorise with red!...<..>. Remember, red enters the eye more quickly than any other colour [Rogers: 1]. She does not know a lot about Nigeria, where the events of the story take place. The main character’s carelessness about cultural differences and preoccupation with the idea of helping the refuge women to change their lives by earning money with the help of sewing business distracted her from being aware of other issues connected with such important aspects as religious conflicts and social position of women in the country.

The British colonial policy of Indirect Rule, a divide-and-rule system that required sharp ethno-religious differentiation among Nigerians, made religion and ethnicity the markers of identity. As a result, in Northern Nigeria, minority ethnic groups, mostly Christians, defined and still define themselves against the Muslim Hausa-Fulani majority, under the political rubric of Middle Belt, which is usually a stand-in for “non-Muslim” [Ochonu 2014]. Jane Rogers researched these issues to provide a plausible context and inserted the concepts into narration by partial nomination.

Fran, I don’t understand’.

Fran spoke flatly.

‘A Fulani woman has been killed here, amongst Christians.

What don’t you understand? … [16]

The most frustrating thing for Julie is being ig-nor-ant. Though ignorance referred to the refuge women at the beginning of the story - “Some of these women know nothing”, she told Julie disdainfully […p.4] – at the end becomes the focus in depicting Julie who was ignorant of what had happened. “Only rumours” [14]. The only thing she knew was that the murder weapon was scissors. We can imagine what red colour palette of emotions Julie will experience after she leaves Nigeria but the colour will be her torture ever after.

So she stared out of the window at the stupidly blue sky and the golden-white clouds below, forcing her eyes to stay open. Every time she closed them, red entered in” [16].

What I find engaging in Jane Rogers’s style is her talent to observe at a distance, measuring the event at different points: telescoping, zooming in and out, which is characteristic of a short story writing. The author gives a perspective for viewing the described, and the rest depends on the reader’s imagination and life experience to build on the provided contexts.

In the next story, ‘Conception’ we are looking into a family’s abandoned past that in the course of the storyline becomes the family’s daughter’s meaningful present. By providing the two polar perspectives of the family situations – on the one hand, the family of the narrator and, on the other – the family of the house owner, the author registers the events. The daughter is curious about where she was conceived. The mother tells her her tale of a story to make her daughter happy and convinced that she was wanted and planned and her parents were happy then. This motif of a wanted / unwanted child is recurrent in Rogers’s works, e.g. Island (see the chapter On Mothers ), and again in the short story ‘Where are you, Stevie?’ in Hitting Trees with Sticks .

The narration about the sacrament of conception occurs at the background of the housewifely process when the mother and daughter are slicing runner beans. The detail of mentioning it adds many implications to the whole story. As “they were going to freeze them in old ice cream containers… ” [17]. The image of the frozen beans can be interpreted as the motherly made-up story once told to her daughter and never to be asked about again, hence, never changed. Reading this story reminded me of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Hills like White Elephants’ . In that story, a girl is obviously frustrated and the man assures her of the operation she has to do to get rid of the only thing that’s made them unhappy [Hemingway: 36]. Contrasting images of “the thing”, “the slicing runner beans” process and the image of a young girl who is curious about the mystery of her origin (imagined by the reader) give plenty of emotions and associations, evoked by the image. Providing a striking image is Jane Rogers’s essential characteristic of style.

In the story ‘Morphogenesis’ the author aims at imitating a piece of machinery of the human brain. Alan Turing and his computational models have influenced scholars to model human psychology and the workings of the human mind. Inspired by reading of the scientist’ s biography Jane Rogers restores the work of the ‘remarkable mind’ [Rogers 2013] and tries to find her way into his way of thinking.

At 10, 16, 17, 38, 39, 41 the scientist mind and body grows to finally “diffuse through the lectures, papers, and computing machines he has authored” [p.37]. After cracking the German Enigma code, ex- pediting the Allies’ victory in World War II, Turing was shamed and ostracized by the British government. He was convicted of homosexuality and sentenced to chemical castration. He published The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis shortly after his trial and killed himself less than two years later, in June 1954. He was just 41 years old [Burrows 2014]. Rogers’s research into the scientist’s biography, his burning curiosity (as she herself puts it in the interview) allows her to describe with the smallest detail the physicality of his experimentation and feel the fascination of the scientist’s mind. In the last paragraph of the story which describes “the effects of cyanide upon his system” we learn about the fact of his suicide which is absurd for us and some can find it ironic but in this story Jane Rogers finishes “her task” of the project, which is a metaphorical passage full of images and associations,

A radical alteration occurs when, through reaction and diffusion, a tipping point is reached, and the changes which have been occurring one light switch at a time, in one single street, are multiplied across cities, countries, a continent, as a million lights go on and in one mighty flash, blow the grid, and fade to black [38].

The true scientist’s mission is all about inventing and experimenting and in the authors’ negotiable context, his death is nothing but expenses of production, professional need and contribution to the study of the human body. Rewriting history in fiction and drama is a frequent technique used by many contemporary authors. For example, Hilary Mantel’s story ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’ or Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III. The idea of giving another perspective to look at things from a different point of view is intriguing. There are many terms, which have appeared recently in historiography to describe the technique: folk-history, historical revisionism, historical ne-gationism (denialism). As such, writers too are “detectives” and “truth-seekers” in their imaginative negotiable contexts.

In Good Fiction Guide Jane Rogers writes that her “guiding star is Orwell”. According to Orwell, “Good prose is like a window pane” [Rogers et al. 2001: 8]. Jane Rogers’s style is also frank and easy. Like Orwell, she writes in order to make you see what she wants you to see [Woloch 2016: 357]. Orwell wrote in his essay ‘Why I Write’, that “His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in”. “In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly” [Orwell 1946].

When you hear the character speak their language you build on every aspect of their life – intimacy, materiality, memory. In a short story that is ‘an exercise in cutting’, according to Rogers [interview], ‘limitation is the point’ and in this technique Rogers is similar to Chekov, Mansfield and Hemingway. However, in spite of transparency of the language there is much to understand by the reader.

One of my favourite stories in this collection is ‘Where are you, Stevie?’ Again, the author uses many referencing and partial nominations “building on” the main character Stevie, who is dead, and through other people’s evidence, the character becomes “alive”, he is found by the reader through a set of conflicting evidence. Rogers uses this type of literary device in the form of paraphrasing and quoting her characters’ worlds. ‘The glory of fiction is putting yourself into somebody’s head,’ she says in her interview. There are four women whom the reader meets speaking of Stevie, four stories in one. Amanda, suffering from noise pollution before Christmas time is the first. She cannot focus on the main thing because she is distracted by noises around; she cannot switch them off,

– Right. As if they give a toss. Rehearsal at 7.30. I need to get going. You-will-get-a-sentimental-feeling-when-you-hear-Christmas-time-so-let’s-be-jolly-Deck-the-halls-with - Oh for heaven ’s sake stop: if you are like this before November 26^th, how are you going to be afterwards? How will you be at… [40].

In the course of such bits of “dialogue” interrupted by many digressions the reader learns at the end that Stevie was a boy who had some troubles and needed money which made him steal it. Amanda caught him red-handed but did not tell anybody. Then we hear Maggie’s evidence, who is Stevie’s grandmother. However, the reader has to figure out the relations because the author does not state them. Each personage starts with what seems to be the focus of his or her mind. Thus, for his grandmother it is important that she “gave him the choice” to come and leave in her house or stay at his mother’s. What the reader learns from her evidence is “She were a crap mother”, “Once a slut always a slut”. She drank alcohol and Stevie’s choice was to support her. Lisa was his girlfriend,

Hahaha. Right. I’m heartless. Just totally without human emotions. I am a cyborg or something. I don’t care about what happens to anyone, OK?” [51].

But what the reader can understand from her self-humiliating blah-blah-blah is that she was a girl who blamed herself, that she left him that evening, and according to her words, “ He didn’t do drugs. So – it happened because of me. Whatever the weather ”. The things she tells are the answers to the questions that can be asked by people, police, anybody. But the way she answers shows that she loves the boy and will miss him and she is not a cyborg at all. Finally, Katrina, a deaf girl who lives in the neighbouring house, tells her story of Stevie. The girls’ parents are deaf too. The philosophy they live by is you had better be deaf than be able to hear the noises around you, which is shocking to Stevie and the reader. Jane Rogers can show you the opposite nature of things, the way you have never thought about them before. In Katrina’s story we learn about Stevie as a helpful and encouraging friend who talked to her trying to change her thoughts about living in the deadly deaf world.

There is another story that can blow your mind, ‘The Ghost in the Corner’. You can never understand it until you accept the author’s grid points of looking at it, a ghost of a busy woman talking to the ghost of a human being. You can laugh aloud when you read it and recognize “yourself”.

I don’t know when he turned up. The ghost. Like I said, I was busy. It seems to me that by that time I got round to speaking to him, he’d already been there a few days. I must have ignored him for a while, or avoided looking at him, naturally hoping he’d go away. Usually when you ignore men, they do [97].

Unfortunately, the limits of the paper do not allow me to analyze the humour of the situation so brilliantly zoomed at by Jane Rogers in this story. A reader must get the whole idea, which cements the 20 stories in this collection. Hitting Trees with Sticks is an umbrella image for all of them showing women hurting themselves in different lives under different circumstances. Looked at from aside this must be a sight. Dear author, give us another story to read to enjoy unravelling your tangle of ideas.

When I thought about the stories in this collection in spite of their heterogeneity and diverse geographies one theme seemed looming large and that is about women, and how it is to be them – mothers and daughters, sisters and girlfriends, fellow travellers and lovers. Rogers’s stories are so unlike each other and reading each of them tricks the reader to get to the core of her ideas and their implications. Her mature observation and unexpectedness of thought replace the classical type of refined descriptions and dialogue.