About this item
Highlights
- A young girl growing up in a turbulent family setting creates a secret inner world to escape her toxic environment.
- Author(s): Fanen Chiahemen
- 108 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
Description
Book Synopsis
A young girl growing up in a turbulent family setting creates a secret inner world to escape her toxic environment. Emotionally neglected, confused and dislocated, she begins to exhibit erratic behaviour, and while the adults around her are unable to respond with love, her fantasy activity intensifies, sowing the seeds of alienation and a distorted self-image. Keenly observant, knowing and adaptive, she is driven to seek help despite the obstacles in her way, eventually finding the courage to take her first steps towards uncovering the truth.
Told through the eyes of a child in a suite of stories and poetry, never make a sound is a raw, intimate journey of a young girl finding a way to survive in an impossible situation. A true story of resilience and the strength of the human spirit.
Review Quotes
Fanen Chiahemen's harrowing memoir never make a sound sends us tumbling into a childhood of "beautifully hellish years." With language that moves deftly from quiet confession to lion's roar, Chiahemen evokes the past as predator, where escape to fantasy is always a close call. Experiencing both neglect and constant disruption (new cities, schools, family environments), home becomes elusive, and these poems and stories are linked by one frustrating truth: the grown-ups let her down. never make a sound is an author reaching back in time, extending a hand to the child she once was, and making a promise: "I'm here to help. And this is what we needed."
-David James Brock, author of Ten-Headed Alien and Everyone is CO2
"...poetic, associative, embodied and emboldened...this book will be of help to those who also had lived traumatic childhoods because Fanen describes the subjective world to which a child can retreat in such an emotionally, viscerally vivid way. Fanen's use of punctuation, small letters and empty spaces are an effective way of drawing one into the subjective processes of the mind. The withdrawal into the safety of the inner world and the discrepancy this created between the inside and outside of her existence was made necessary by the degree to which all the adults in her world needed her to meet their needs while her own were neglected and discounted. Fanen's rage, shame, guilt had to be hidden to protect others from the 'bad' they saw in her. This isolated her even more. The writing is remarkable and incredible."
-Gabriela Legorreta, PhD, psychologist/psychoanalyst;
Margo Zysman, M.A., psychologist