Autism Vox

Rage in the Iliad and Reasonable People

by Kristina Chew, PhD on May 24th, 2007

Rage.

Do you ever feel it? Or maybe I should say, need I ask?

As the parent of an autistic child doing my best to take care of him, to represent his needs before bureaucrats at an IEP meeting or to medical professionals who nod and that’s all, to ignore a random passerby who has stared: These have been moments of feeling something strong. And also as a parent, I have been witness to strong emotions coursing through Charlie that I think could be considered “rage.” A year and a half ago, something passionately felt seemed often on the verge of bursting out of Charlie. He had been too long in classrooms that did not know how to teach him; he was bored; he had become a “behavior problem” at his old school, and time and again something in him seemed just to burst out, as wordless voiced sounds, as flailing. Was Charlie feeling—as I did then—-mad at the world? Mad at a world in which all manner of negative messages were being sent to him: Why did he not “get” it, after the same flashcards had been set down for the thousandth time? Why did people ask him “did you bump your head” when the evidence was on his forehead and he was feeling the hurt? Why did the sounds coming from his mouth not lead to him getting what he was picturing in his mind?

I am lucky: When I feel rage I can talk about it, write about it, read what others have to say about it and set my feelings into context. Charlie can talk some, and write and read a very little: He has far fewer, and far more limited outlets than I do. He was very understandably mad today when, after a lovely long walk, we ended up heading home instead of stopping at the grocery store. “Yay!” he said very loudly and we both kept on walking. I told him I agreed he should be mad—we had been walking for over an hour on a warm afternoon—but we had plenty of food at home as we had just gone to the store the day before. We walked, Charlie recalled some things he had chosen yesterday and not yet eaten, we walked home.

Charlie was humming a tune by the time we made our way up the driveway. I used to try to placate Charlie when he was so angry, to put a stop to his anger as quickly as possible. Over time and sometimes harsh experience I’ve learned that rage must run its course. It helped that we were out walking; the physical exercise was soothing in its own right. And, I have learned to say or otherwise communicate to Charlie that getting angry is okay (it should be so obvious).

After all, it was rage that is the first word of what can be called the first work of Western literature, Homer’s Iliad. These are Homer’s opening words:

menin aeide thea

“Rage: Sing, goddess…..

Menis means “anger, wrath, rage,” and the menis referred to here is specifically that of Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem about the Trojan War. Achilles is enraged at Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek army, for taking one of Achilles’ hard-won prizes, a slave girl, Briseis; moreover, menis is what the entire Greek army is feeling, as the Iliad is set in the tenth year of the Trojan War. The Greeks have been away from home for all those years and are restless and uneasy about the outcome of the war, and about whether they will ever return hom; their rage simmers just below. Achilles’ anger over his slighted honor is so great that he almost kills Agamemnon and is stopped only when Athena, the goddess of wisdom, pulls him by the hair and stops him.

Some Athena has stepped down and pulled me back to think about strategy and to be sensible more than a few times, especially during a series of meetings with various administrators and the outside behavior consultant in our old school district two years ago, and I do not think I am alone among parents in feeling so intensely. (I will note that, yes, Charlie’s IEP meeting is coming up in a few weeks and while things are good, those three letters–I, E, P—come with potent associations for the parent of an autistic child: Perhaps I am unconsciously readying my strategy, “just in case.”) Many passages in the just-published Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption by Grinnell College English professor Ralph Savarese vividly convey these kinds of intense feelings—of rage, of anger, and also of love—as the author and his wife, Emily, in the course of adopting DJ, who is autistic and non-verbal, contend with the Florida foster care system, with other public agencies, with DJ’s biological mother. When Savarese and his wife are informed that DJ has been terribly beaten while in one foster care home, there is a lot, a lot, of feeling.

…..I excoriated the Department of Children and Families, demanding to know how it could have placed DJ in a home with five other foster children and a foster mother who clearly didn’t want him. Emily had begged the Department to place him elsewhere. “This is how children get killed!” I yelled in my usual dramatic fashion, desperate to undo what had happened with ample outrage. Of course, I knew how badly DCF suffered from a shortage of foster homes, and people like me weren’t exactly vying to become foster parents. But my liberal rhetoric often got our ahead of my actions, bathing the world in legitimate but empty complaint. (p. 51)

……………..

Who could brutalize a three-year-old? What kind of barbarism was this? I’d obviously heard of child abuse, but I’d never seen this sort of injury up close. (p. 52)

As DJ gets older, he not only recalls his abusive early childhood and those who hurt him, but also begins to write about it—and to rage. Savarese writes too, with constant honesty and also humor, about a kind of rage, a menis, that parents of autistic children can feel so hard it really hurts: Why does it have to be so hard?

The more DJ confronted the past, the more frantic he became, hitting and poking in a blitzkrieg of violence. We were starting to have to hold him down and immobilize his head so that he wouldn’t injure himself during his outbursts. ….Conversations with DJ had usually been able to bring him around to a sensible understanding of his actions. ‘i was miudbeha vi9ng tofay at s chopolk [misbehaving today at school],’ he’d say. But his outbursts had become so common that retrospective acknowledgement of them no longer helped in the present. It just seemed part of a cycle that had us spiraling downward. (p. 189)

It is hard and yet, knowing that others feel similar depths and jubilation, is reason for deep comfort and for sympathy that captures the Greek roots of the word, sym meaning “with” and pathos meaning “emotion” and “passion” and also “that which happens to a person of thing.” Incorporated into Savarese’s narrative are the thoughts, the words, of his son DJ himself; are DJ’s memories, feelings, hopes.

I believe in the people who want to love me. I am thankful for my family. I will try to smile at everyone. I enjoy being at school. I dream about life. I wonder what I will become of myself. I need to be focused. I wear buttoned-up shirts. I’m glad I’m DJ.

My son Charlie cannot type and read like DJ—not yet, this is. Thanks to DJ, and Savarese—thanks to Reasonable People—I have a few more glimpses of what menis might be in Charlie; of rage, and so much more.

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POSTED IN: Adoption, Autism Lit, Books, Classics, Literature, Military, Myth, Parenting, Poetry