In the Dream House

by Carmen Maria Machado

What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives.

How do we do right by the wronged people of the past without physical evidence of their suffering? How do we direct our record keeping toward justice?

But house idioms and their variants, in fact, often signify the opposite of safety and security. If something is a house of cards it is precarious, easily disrupted. If the writing is on the wall we can see the end of something long before it arrives. If we do not throw stones in glass houses, it is because the house is constructed of hypocrisy, readily shattered. All expressions of weakness, of the inevitability of failure. “Safe as houses” is something closer to “the house always wins.” Instead of a shared structure providing shelter, it means that the person in charge is secure; everyone else should be afraid.

This is what I keep returning to: how people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator. And after that decision has been made, what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?

It’s as if one scientist spent decades developing a downward-facing propulsion system to get an apple to descend to the ground and another one just used gravity. Same result, entirely different levels of effort.

But that’s the minority anxiety, right? That if you’re not careful, someone will see you—or people who share your identity—doing something human and use it against you.

It’s not being radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove. In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail. But people have trouble with this concept. It’s like how, after Finding Nemo, people who were ill equipped to take care of them rushed to buy clown fish and how the fish died. People love an idea, even if they don’t know what to do with it. Even if they only know how to do exactly the wrong thing.

We think of clichés as boring and predictable, but they are actually one of the most dangerous things in the world. Your brain can’t engage a cliché, not properly—it skitters right over the phrase or sentence or idea without a second thought. To describe an abusive situation is almost certainly to deploy cliché: “If I can’t have you, no one can.” “Who will believe you?” “It was good, then it was bad, then it was good again.” “If I stayed, I would have died.” Awful and dehumanizing, and yet straight out of central casting. This triteness, this predictability, has a flattening effect, making singularly boring what is in fact a defining and terrible experience.