Victims of Divine Design

Living in the third wave civilization at the doorsteps of the new millennium in the heart of culture and refined traditions it is shattering to note that the bright lights of future were nipped in the bud and smothered in the beds. The recent revelation of the Sunday Mirror about the Sci-fi master Arthur Clarke’s delinquent sexual deviance and abuse of teenage boys in Sri Lanka is an outrageous atrocity and brutal deprivation of innocence and an act of human disgrace that puts to shame any right thinking individual.

It is interesting to probe into the predicament of children in the contemporary literature to understand whether economic deprivation and its implication are responsible. For this purpose three writers of different periods from three continents, Arundhathi Roy of the 90s from Asia, Toni Morrison of the 70s from America and William Golding of the 50s from Europe were surveyed. In scanning these writers and their projection of children and the problems they are exposed to in the process of their growing up especially at their early puberty stage, attention is paid to parental attitude, society’s abnegation of its responsibility, failure of social relief centers in the restoration of their rightful privileges and the other factors which are directly or otherwise responsible for their predicament. In this connection, it is very interesting to note that Betrand Russel, the 20th century’s greatest rational thinker and philosopher, commented that an unhappy child can never grow up into a happy man.

Estha, in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, is only five years old when he entered Abhilash talkies with oozing innocence to watch the film. The Sound of Music. Being so young and so tender, he could not contain himself and started singing the popular songs. The grown ups pushed him into the unprotected wilderness of the world where animals ripped him apart and raped his innocence. Still the innocence overflowed in the corridor of the theatre until the middle aged canteen man tempted him with an ‘Orange Lemonade’ and sexually abused him. This created a crises of confusion and a storm of guilt in his young heart. Consequently he stopped talking, altogether. The song of innocence is lost and the confusion of suddenly growing up made him almost asexual. His mother Ammu’s affair with Velutha to which these young children bear witness worsened their sense of identity and the police brutality on Ammu and Velutha convinced them of their own insignificance. Estha became a walking vegetable, a grown up man with emotional retardation. Since Roy claims that it is a memoir novel, and the evidence of topography and character relations are very much available here, we have a classic case to question ‘who is responsible for this unspeakable tragedy perpetuated upon the tender souls?’ .

In other words Estha is a tender Hamlet. Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, enjoys the extended childhood in the libraries of Wittenburg University where he suddenly received the news of his father’s unnatural death. By the time he reaches Elsonore his mother marries his uncle. The ghost’s revelation puts him in a state of dementia and Ophelia’s deception or her playing a decoy has upset his sanity. He becomes a vegetable and he cannot act and he is lost in the woods of his own thoughts, unable to retrace his steps to sanity and sensibility. After all Hamlet is almost thirty years of age when the world played a collective deception upon him. But Estha is only five when he saw the policemen brutalising his helpless mother in the very police station and he being sexually abused on the rare occasion of watching a musical melody “the Sound of Music”. Their only beloved friend and guardian, Velutha was hunted like an animal and killed by the police and it is the last straw to break the camel’s . Like a cursed Cane he left Ayemenem and explored the world trying to recreate his lost paradise but could never overcome the sensation of hot pulsating thing in one hand and repulsive cold orange lemonade in the other hand, he could never shrug off himself from this cob web.

If ‘character is destiny’ Estha is no way responsible for his own tragedy. If ‘destiny is character’ putting young children’s future in the cruel hands of destiny is quite an ungodly act. Either way he is the victim of divine design.

Toni Morrison, who represents and reproduces the black experience in her first novel The Bluest Eye, contemplates wishfully whether children can be ugly. The repercussions of this economically deprived and suppressed gender which is exposed to the ruthless cultural suppression and parental neglect drive Pocola, the central character to explore her limited world and slip into the absurdity of her sensibilities. Morrison claims that she chooses beauty or the absence of beauty in children as of thematic significance when she comes across newspaper statements during Veitnam war that splashed across the American continent crying ‘such beautiful children wasted away’. That prompted her to ponder whether ugly children make any difference. In one of her interviews she says that black is beautiful is a hoax, a self deception. When this minority black community is grafted to the majority white community which ruthlessly imposed its standards killing the very essence of their identity, they go introvert and get perverted. When economically marginalised, they slip into atavism. So it is no wonder Cholly Breedlove rapes his daughter Pecola. All that Toni Morrison wants us to do is not to explore how but to question why.

No doubt black is beautiful and every mother celebrates the blackness of her child in African continent as we understood from Alex. Hailey’s Roots. However, this pervert grafting of blacks to a civilization in which black mothers are domestics in white households and fathers turned dipsomaniacs to overcome the impotency of their manliness, the children art victims of this so called refined American culture. Cholly Breedlove, becomes an orphan in his childhood and is left in the protection of a virago aunt. When he tries to explore the pleasures of biology in the accepting the company of one of is cousins, he is haunted by the white men and baptised into the world of animals at gun point. That left a deep scar on his psyche and his father’s refusal to accept him, completed the conversion to animalistic state from that of a human being. In such a state he comes across Pauline who has fallen into the world of white cinema quite irrevocably. And as a child that is begotten by such parents, Pecola’s destiny is doomed before she is born.

Mother ill-treats, friend humiliates, father rapes, church proves ghastly whereas ironically the three prostitutes extend their warmth. The confusion that follows her pregnancy when she was forced to mother her own brother, she slips into the world of her own madness. Such a tender child, an innocent girl is brutalised by the society that perpetuated quite an unspeakable horror on her.

In the case study of Estha and Pecola it is seen that the aggressor is the adult world. Society failed to protect the defenseless youngsters. Balantyne in his book Coral Island, proved that if children are left to themselves they exercise orderliness and perfection creating an idyllic world. Even the pantheist philosopher Wordsworth believed that the divine grace is very much there in a child. But the growing exploration of the mundane world and its corrupt practices lead him away from the heavenly state. It prompted Wordsworth to assert that the child is the father of man. In his book ‘Lord of Etics’, William Golding the Nobel Prize Winner, deals with the same problem of the children. He presents different kinds of children - a disciplined Ralph, a saint like Simon, a fool like Peggy and an aggressive person like Merridew. There are a few timid creatures.

In the beginning the white conch as a symbol of orderliness binds these children together but with the realisation of the fact that they are beyond the reach of civilised world, they gradually drop the mask of enforced discipline and become vicious and wild with primitive passions. Their act of hunting a pig is a bare necessity to satisfy their hunger but later it becomes a dance of evil in them and in the process they hunt Simon like a pig, who comes to them with the truth about Lord of flies. Crucifying the truth and innocence they become monstrous and try to hunt each other, until a passing ship notices the flames of their vicious fury. The conflict of psychological compulsions and intellectual emotions criss-crossed and transformed innocence into beastly ignorance.

Whatever the reasons may be, it is quite unacceptable in letters or reality, to deprive the children of their innocence and allow violence to man their lives and let social problems marginalise them. They are the torchbearers of human progress and the glitter in their eyes should never be clouded. But the rape of Pecola, sexual abuse of Estha, and senseless slaughter of Simon are the stark reminders of the failings of the cultural evolution of mankind. These are but three samples selected from the recent novels to show how children are abused in this world.