Chapter 2- Wooden Horse
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As a child
You have a doll
You see this doll
Sitting in her chairYou watch her face
Her knees apart
Her eyes of glass
In a secretive stare
“As a Child” (Suzanne Vega)
Much of the best of Suzanne Vega’s writing – her lyrics, poems, essays, stories – stems from, or relates to, a memory of childhood. Her appeal – or perhaps the better word is enigma – as a writer and performer is the manner in which the adult is inhabited by the young girl, and conversely, the way the child foreshadows the adult. This amalgam of child and adult is present in most people, but it is especially pronounced in Vega’s work. You might even catch a glimpse of this in her mannerisms, which seems so similar to the child who “carried [herself] with this way of being like a princess and even if I was going through the garbage it was always with a certain manner, which I think sometimes other people found annoying.”
The idea of childhood is important because it brings together several important themes in Vega’s writing: “remembering;” the idea of a “secret;” escape; silence; guilt. Vega’s music is populated with secrets, screens, and private places, especially the secret, private places of the imagination of a child, of the inner life-of-the-mind. Particularly striking, however, is how often and strongly we see the theme of secrets and escape in Vega’s writing as a child, and in the songs, poems, and essays that take us back to her childhood: the “secret self” of “Some Journey;” the “secret burning thread” in “The Queen and the Soldier;” and in “The Marching Dream”;
I wished that could hear
Each secret told
By lovers in the battle
With each shade of red and gold.
Even at age nine, the idea of solitude and escaping within is clearly present in a short poem like “By Myself:” “And now I don’t even/Have one little wish/Except to be by myself/Each and every day.” In “Daniella,” a poem written at sixteen, we see again fantasy, escape, and secrets:
Daniella, she sits by the tree in the playground,
Sometimes we go there and the children all play.
But no one can tell me just where is Daniella
When she looks in the distance that way.
Her portrayal of childhood in general often has the dark menace of a Brothers’ Grimm tale – the world outside is a dangerous, unpredictable place. Violence, or the threat of it, lurks everywhere. The darkness of “Wooden Horse” or of “Luka” comes as no surprise; it is the same place from which arises the cool, almost contemplative appraisal of violence in a poem like “Song of the Black Dress:”
The dress is black
It’s made of lace
Ripped and torn along the hem.
The only way to make it fit.
Tear the dress
And rip the girl.
Throughout her work, the “secret” often takes the form of hidden trauma and the need to disguise and otherwise mask evidence of the event. Emotions are things to master and suppress. One’s true self and identity is something to hide, as if the inner child might only survive if it is kept hidden away. In “Tears,” emotions are killed quickly and cleanly; silence is the ideal:
When the white bird
Comes beating up in my breast
Blinding and blurring my eyes
With its hot white feathertips
I beat it down.
And when it rises again
In its white hot flurry
I will snap its little neck.
Don’t cry.
Don’t scream.
(“Tears”)
Silence (and solitude) surfaces again in “Not Me:”
and when will you stop running
from a human situation?
he said, do you think your silences
are helping this relation?
do you think your solitude
will teach you to be free?
I said, I don’t know who you are talking to
I know it is not me
Or in “Command:”
As though you could
Command the silence
Itself to speak.As though you could
Demand
From nothing
A being.
An answer.
In “The Queen and the Soldier,” the Queen “strangles,” maintaining a literal and figurative lock on her emotions and voice; silence and solitude reign:
And the soldier was killed, still waiting for her word
And while the queen went on strangling in the solitude
She preferred
The battle continued on …
Guilt, usually for an unnamed sin or deed, surfaces throughout her work. In “Judge and Justice and the Little Jury” we read:
“I see you have taken a vow of silence somewhere” he said, and he put his
hand over her mouth. “This is your crime. Now you must never tell anyone
what is about to happen, for you are guilty and must do penance.”
Or this, from “Confession:”
Excuse me please I know that it is
Boring to repeat
And to repeat the tale
Again but reallyWhat is there to do?
but to accuse
and defend
to any handy jury
the details of the crimes;
Years later, in “Penitent,” we read:
forgive me all my blindnesses
my weakness and unkindnesses
as yet unbending still.
Or in “Song in Red and Gray” there is both guilt and the disguises
that mask
secrets:
I feel that she peeled back my
guilty disguise.