*There is discussion of suicide and war violence in this post.*
In the early sting of my breakup and eviction I knew I would later need to get myself back on track. Before that relationship, I had been a content singleton by choice focusing on my career trajectory, which at the time was in academia. I’m reconnecting with ten-years-ago me, catching her up on the new professional path that keeps the old one in its periphery (the best, nerdier parts of it, at least), and I’m allowing her to school me on being your own good company and knowing yourself and your needs in life.
In the early spell of shock, confusion and need for action while ill and being forced to wait for things, I figured I’d need stuff to look forward to. I’d need things for me and my work. I am a writer aspiring to be an author - I must get out there into my community. Yes, money in time will be tight, but for now I’ve got savings, I don’t spend much, and between two regular jobs I’ll be alright for a while. I must go to events relevant to my work, learn from others, and give as much as I get from the writing life.
And so I booked tickets to the two events at 2024’s Durham Book Festival that resonated with me most. A bonus was that one was presented by someone who’s been a positive presence in my life - a big reason why I moved to Aberdeen in 2013 for my first teaching position and where I made some of the strongest enduring friendships I have. I overrode my socialised impulse to ‘not be a bother’ and reached out to say I was attending, and this incredibly busy person made time for me and we had an enriching and deep conversation after an emotionally raw talk by classicist Professor Edith Hall.
Hall talked about her latest book Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the ancient Greeks, and me (Yale University Press, 2024), a personal scrutiny of challenging circumstances that sheds shame and focuses on people whose lives have been shaped and affected by others’ suicides and all survivors of bereavement. She explained that ancient Greek tragedy makes no judgement on those who die by suicide, and often focuses on those who grieve them free of the monotheistic moral baggage that came with the growth and spread of judeo-christian-islamic traditions.
It’s a personal book because suicides run through Hall’s family past, deeply affecting in particular her mother who would not discuss the pain of her own mother’s suicide - the grandmother Hall was named for, which only heightened her mother’s lack of emotional availability for Hall throughout her life. While her behaviour was hard to take, Hall reflects that her mother did the strenuous work of breaking the cycle of suicides in her line (there were many more than her mother going generations back). This is the work she calls facing down the Furies, the mythological beings who eat blood drawn of untimely death for which they pursue murderers, suicides, and any death that shouldn’t have happened.
Hall compared Aristotle and Socrates, the latter the intellectual grandfather of the former. They were both accused of the same crime of corrupting the youth of Athens. Where Socrates decided to leave his family and followers and die by poison rather than face what he considered to be living in shame, Aristotle chose to exile himself and live up to his familial responsibilities beyond the city state where he could be free.
Hall pointed out that later with monotheism, only god decides people’s moral value and that stigma persists for anyone who has taken their own life even though it is no longer a crime. It was the Enlightenment that brought secular reasons for people not to kill themselves, more along the lines of the practicalities and the impact on those they leave behind. As part of the broader later pushback against the Enlightenment, writers and artists would begin glorifying suicide (she gave the lineage of Goethe, Sartre and the Nouvelle Vague, for instance) but never show the sufferers left behind.
The ancient Greeks did. And their plays have lessons. She gave examples that show the effects either way of leaving someone who is suicidal alone when they insist they are fine: the plays where everyone is convinced and they do it the moment they’re alone, and those with the great friends who stay and refuse to leave until the phase truly has passed, and then help bear the impossible pain their friend finds themselves in.
Her closing message was for us to sing the song of sorrow, but let good prevail, and consider what we need to do to be good ancestors.
Given recent events, I am more grateful than ever for the power of friendship, a topic that emerged strongly in ‘Writing from Conflict’, the second panel I attended. Speakers for this session were Peace Adzo Medie talking about her novel Nightbloom (Oneworld, 2023), Ibtisam Azem speaking about her speculative novel The Book of Disappearance (And Other Stories, 2024), and the young Yeva Skalietska telling us about You Don't Know What War Is: The Diary of a Young Girl From Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Nightbloom was longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction and centres on two girls who are cousins and also best friends living in the same Ghanaian town. Their relationship is tested when one withdraws as they age and they go their separate ways as adults. A crisis brings them back together and forces them to confront the childhood trauma they had previously avoided addressing.
The Book of Disappearance has the fascinating premise of imagining a world in which all Palestinian people suddenly vanish, which is worked through via an ‘across the barricades’ friendship between a man from Jaffa descended from survivors of the Nakba and an Israeli woman who is a liberal Zionist.
You Don’t Know What War Is is the published diary of then-twelve-year-old Yeva written as Russia’s attacks and war on Ukraine unfold, and her family’s continual displacements as they flee the relentless bombings of their home city and everywhere in Ukraine they take refuge, until eventually making it to Ireland. Very much of its time, the diaries are shaped by ongoing conversations with her friends left behind and still in daily fear of their lives.
The stories are each ultimately clarion calls for compassion and hope in the face of extreme adversity, and a stark reminder of what no one, but particularly children and young people, should never have to endure.