“As an adoptee, one of the toughest things is the idea of shifting identities,” writes Jan Beatty in “American Bastard: A Memoir.””
“No one is who they say they are: The adopted parents are masquerading as the ‘real’ parents, the ‘real parents’ don't seem to exist, the adoptee's story is invisible, and the adoptee herself is operating under an alias. It's essential to the adoptee to be able to cut through the bull**** in life and find what seems like the ‘truth.’”
Red Hen Press ($15.95)
Beatty is best known as one of the most highly regarded poets in Pittsburgh. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, as well as a Creative Achievement Award in Literature from the Heinz Foundation. She directs the Madwomen in the Attic Workshops at Carlow University.
With “American Bastard: A Memoir,” she yanks on the red thread of her experiences as an adoptee, which have informed much of her poetry over the years, and offers them up to the reader undiluted. This is hard, strong stuff.
The gloves come off immediately, as readers have come to expect from Beatty. “This ‘chosen baby’ crap is the biggest lie to ever come down the pike,” she writes in direct opposition to our culturally accepted notions of adoption. She confronts the reader: “Try staying with the foreign idea that a baby is born, then sold to another person. Stay with it. There is the physical trauma of the broken bond. There is the erasure of the baby's entire history.
“The adoptee's family is a lie, her name is a lie, she has no grounding in the world,” she writes, effectively tearing the rose-colored glasses from our eyes.
“I had assembled huge walls of protection over the years as a way to stay alive,” Beatty confesses. “An adoptee needs to have a strategy from a young age, whether conscious or not — a way to manage this hole of abandonment, loss and grief. It's too much for a child to handle. The loss of identity, the complete erasure of history, the floating in the world without a name. The original loss of being taken from a mother at birth, and then the adoptive parents pretending that they are your parents.”
Beatty calls this phenomena an adoptee’s “primary, lifelong trauma.”
By deftly weaving together prose and poetry into a hybrid form, her memoir operates on multiple levels simultaneously. Beatty's investigation into her own erased past uncovers court documents, old photographs and ultimately contact with both of her birth parents. The inclusion of poems offers her a space for the unruly and intense emotions that threaten to capsize the book in a violent flood. Those emotions are not so much walled off by the poetic form. Rather the shift in texture creates a visual analog to those feelings, an undertow of raw turmoil — “I was swirling into the streambed, / lost in the downstream plunge.”
Perhaps the greatest impediment to Beatty's mission to reclaim her own story is America itself. She writes:
“The culture of North America has an obsession with ‘niceness’ — or, more accurately, the appearance of niceness. If North America doesn't want to tell the truth about how bad someone looks in a dress or in that sweater — I can live with that. But when North America systematically erases the history of its citizens and then calls the infant a lucky one, a ‘chosen’ baby, enlisting cooperation by invoking the ‘sacredness of mother love’ (another misrepresentation) — I have to draw a line. It’s very clear that we, as citizens of the world, are not supposed to question the idea of motherhood. Motherhood as an invention is sacred ground, not to be made dirty by any sense of what's real.”
Ultimately, Beatty is offering up her own story as a corrective to those culturally enforced tropes. Calling “American Bastard: A Memoir” a brave book does it a severe disservice. Doing so limits the reach of what the author has rendered to the solitary contours of her own life. No, much better to call this book exactly what it is: This book is necessary. Beatty needed to write it and the rest of us need to read it. She has given us as a people a vital piece of our own story, a piece we may not have even known was taken from us.
Kristofer Collins is a writer living in Stanton Heights. His most recent book is "The River Is Another Kind of Prayer: New & Selected Poems."
First Published: November 9, 2021, 11:00 a.m.
