Exiles by Carolyn Kay Steedman

Exiles by Carolyn Kay Steedman

First impressions of Steedman's "Exiles" left me feeling as if the woman had a lot of sour grapes to deal with. The overall flavor of the piece leans toward the negative, the cynical and sometimes even the sarcastic. She seems particularly critical of her parents, who probably did their best with what they had, but nowhere do we see much in the way of compassionate empathy on her part. The title she chose for the piece, Exiles, emphasizes the alienation that she felt from her parents, as well as the social/economic alienation which she felt her parents had endured. If I had to place a particular definition on this interpretation, it would be that Steedman suffers from a lack of objectivity.

One such example of this cynicism appears in the last paragraph of page 649, wherein Steedman goes out of her way to describe in detail how her mother lied to her about her past:

As a teenage worker my mother had broken with a recently established tradition and on leaving school in 1927 didn't go into the sheds. She lied to me though when, at about the age of eight, I asked her what she'd done, and she said she'd worked in an office, done clerical work.

Steedman then goes on to say how she had sought out and verified that this lie was true:

. . .I talked to my grandmother and she, puzzled, told me that Edna had never worked in any office, had in fact been apprenticed to a dry-cleaning firm that did tailoring and mending.

Steedman later on sought additional opportunities to reveal her mother's evasion of the truth. From the top of page 650:

. . .Now I can feel the deliberate vagueness in her accounts of those years: "When did you meet daddy?"-"Oh, at a dance, at home." There were no photographs. Who came to London first? I wish now that I'd asked that question.

And so Steedman goes on and on trying to reveal every possible negative thing she can dig up about her parents. She extends her father no more mercy either, as we see at the bottom of page 650:

I remember incidents like these, I think, because I was about seven, the age at which children start to notice social detail and social...

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