Reviewed by Kate Champlin
Content Warning for discussions of abuse, sexual assault, and racism.
Everything that Hurt Us Becomes a Ghost is a thoughtful meditation on abuse survival, racism, and cultural colonialism. Although the author tells us that she is deaf, her deafness is almost never the focus of the poems. Instead, Ravenwood’s deafness appears as a simple fact of life whether her narrator witnesses a bird’s death without hearing it or uses American Sign Language to discuss abuse. This approach makes the chapbook unique among the works that I’ve reviewed for Wordgathering. Ravenwood suggests that there is a hierarchy of stigmatized differences in mainstream culture and that racism can be a greater barrier than discrimination against disability. This approach also suggests that abuse is far more personally damaging than experiences of physical difference.
For example, “Billy Goat and the Two Wolves” discusses how racism leaks into religious doctrine. In this poem, Billy Graham—here sarcastically termed “Televangelist Billy goat”—attempts to reach out to a group of Cherokee listeners using a story related to him by an Inuit informant. (Evidently, the televangelist and his staff overlooked the fact that these are two entirely different cultures.) As Ravenwood suggests:
Strutting like a turkey with an ace hidden in his tail feathers, This shepherd was going to round up these lost sheep using animal hocus pocus his friend shared. (53)
Billy goat clearly did not bother to learn about his audience. His story—about a good wolf and an evil wolf being at war inside each person—provokes outrage. In Cherokee stories, the wolves “need each other” (54). They are symbols of harmony and known to care for pack members who can’t hunt for themselves. The televangelist sees this reaction only as a moment where he can teach his congregation, and his fans praise him for dealing with “those natives” at all. Ravenwood’s poem puts the moment in its true historical and cultural context:
We were the buffalo skinned for pelts and left to rot. The language they cut out of our hair. Brown skin clothed to hide us from father sun. Force fed an Abrahamic religion we became nothing more than a Sunday school lesson in betrayal. (54)
The poem becomes a powerful testament to the racism the Cherokee have endured over the centuries and to how centuries of racism may be brought into focus by specific incidents. The poem also highlights an often underdiscussed problem: both religion and education have been and continue to be used to devalue “other” (minoritized) cultures. Cultural colonization is a form of abuse, and willed cultural ignorance is often used to reinforce this abuse.
In “How to Outlive a Rapist,” Ravenwood turns her attention to abuse within the family. Ravenwood’s narrator sees her adult and child selves standing together at her father’s grave. The narrator realizes that the traumatic memories will always be part of her:
Death cheated. We can’t get his stain off our skin. (58)
Ravenwood’s narrator acknowledges that she has moved forward to a certain extent. Her child-self loosens her grip and fades back into the past. However, she must also acknowledge anger and traumatic memories that are unlikely to ever fade. As Ravenwood puts it:
I want the pieces of her buried with him, to sing to him in his grave. Everything that hurt us becomes a ghost. (58)
This powerful lesson, which is also the chapbook’s title, influences and impacts all of the poems that discuss the Ravenwood family. (Ravenwood also describes a fraught relationship with her religious mother.) The knowledge that abuse can be outlived but not forgotten pervades the poems and will linger with readers. Ravenwood’s insights into social inequalities and personal trauma make her work both uniquely perceptive and important to readers.
“The Creeping Thief,” meanwhile, is the only one of Ravenwood’s poems that takes deafness as its primary theme. This poem describes deafness as a criminal creeping into the narrator’s bedroom and stealing her sound. Simultaneously, the poem makes deafness a source of subtle power. As the final stanza reveals:
I believe the dead hear More than the living Silence is a wordless obituary Deaf rhymes with Death Does that mean I hear more (38)
Many of us have been privy to rhetoric that links disability and death in order to support ableist or eugenic agendas. This poem subverts that rhetoric by taking the link a step further. Ravenwood’s narrator is connected, not to the always-already dead, but to a secret speech that few others hear. Some readers will dispute the idea that disability is a loss. However, they will likely appreciate Ravenwood’s matter-of-fact approach to her own disability and her ability to subvert eugenic rhetoric.
Everything that Hurt Us Becomes a Ghost is a profound meditation on intersections of power, survival, and social justice issues. Ravenwood documents society-wide abuse in the forms of racism, forced religious instruction, and cultural colonialism. She demonstrates that abuse may be survived even though it will never be forgotten and suggests that disability may be both a loss and a form of power.
Title: Everything that Hurt Us Becomes a Ghost
Author: Sage Ravenwood
Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
Date: 2023
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About the Reviewer
Kate Champlin (she/her) is a late-deafened adult and a graduate of Ball State University (Indiana). She currently works as a writing tutor and as a contract worker for BK International Education Consultancy, a company whose aim is to normalize the success of underserved students.