Bewildered by Jessie Ulmer

Sword & Kettle Press, 2022 | Bewildered — Sword & Kettle Press

CW: trauma, child abuse (abandonment, starvation, intended cannibalism), starvation, cannibalism, strong language

“Happily Ever After. A feeble oath whispered in the dark.”

We were raised to think that escape from certain death results in a happy ending. You’re safe, you don’t have to kick and scream, you can be happy. I was stunned watching Room (2015) when the mother and son had gotten free from captivity with half the film still to go. ‘What could be next?’ I thought. ‘They’ve got their happy ending.’

“She has been burning for years now.”

“These prose & poetry pieces explore the different ways in which people experience, remember, & process trauma” (Sword & Kettle Press). In Bewildered, Jessie Ulmer pushes past the recent convention of fairytale reimaginings (‘what if the bad guy was good and the good guy was bad’ (Maleficent), ‘what if the docile hero was a warrior’ (Snow White and the Huntsman)) to drag us past the curtain of that ‘happy ending’. She makes us face the trauma kids would face after being shoved into a burning furnace to be cannibalised. ‘Bewildered’ speaks not just to Hansel and Gretel’s abandonment in the woods, and their horrifying encounter with the witch, but to their aftermath.

Ulmer presents a hybrid collection heavy with diary-esque prose in two interweaving ‘Paths’ (still, in a sense, wandering through those woods) exploring both Hansel and Gretel’s sides of the tale: she introduces both with an erasure or blackout of Maria Tatar’s English translation of the Brothers Grimm story, two formally traumatised recapitulations of a heretofore detached narrative. Beyond  these, interspersed whispers outside of their perspectives: a list poem that reduces the fate of these children to a recipe (“How to Build a House”: “2. measure in doses of hunger. Make sure no one is ever full.”); shards of the witch’s voice; shared-perspective ruminations on the state of their literature (the change of the house from bread to candy: “What decadence, these basic needs”). Don’t be fooled by the prose-looking pages between the lineated poems - each page of this book, each piece, is a poem in its own right, a pebble overturned along the endless journey, just as detached from those around it. Like the Brothers’/Tatar’s Hansel, you’ll have to return to them, turn them over again, sit with them a while. Because they’ll sit with you. There were parts my squeamish self tried to speed past, but it was too late; no matter how far you wander, these scenes will plague you, eat away at you. Reading this will let you acknowledge trauma where it may lie, realise its neverending uphill battle as you feel its metaphysical metaphors work within you, and break down judgement of its myriad manifestations. Bewildered is a masterclass in not only the writing of trauma but also the acknowledgement of its weight.  

“Soon my bones are knotted roots, my body packed earth.”

You think you know this story. It’s embedded in our memories, our childhoods. Before we begin, Ulmer’s direct citation of The Brothers Grimm lets us know she, too,  knows her ground. She even notes the Apocrypha phenomenon, details that have entered public understanding without ever being mentioned in the literature (“The story never says the birds that ate our bread were crows. But we know.”) Bewildered upsets our understanding, reveals the history as really being something else, then actually something else, makes your memories unreliable. I would say to read this book is to let it bewilder you, but the story bewilders within you. It shifts under your feet - Hansel was the quick-witted leader, now he’s the younger brother, Gretel’s the one who’s eaten, Hansel’s the one who eats her, they both died, they’re in IKEA - the ground of the erasure moves, it’s active, “it      e  a     t                s”. This lets Ulmer address multiple ways trauma might manifest and alter our lives.

Ulmer marries physical sensation and psychological trauma perfectly, evidencing how, often, such internal slashes can manifest physical decay. Ulmer knows the sensory weight of memories and masterfully maps this throughout the book. What chases Hansel is the hunger, the bewildering, its auditory manifestation as a hallucinatory “snap of distant branches”, to the point that he guards against them with trail-making in present-day, seemingly irrationally. “Quit dropping shit, she says.” Gretel, after the loss of her bodily autonomy, bitterly reclaims it through her teeth. She uses violent imagery like “Does that take the teeth out?”, and Ulmer deftly writes her voice in direct-address, it’s sharp, it’s harsh, it’s violent. She writes - Gretel speaks - to hurt. To take back control.

“Here’s a thing [about] trauma survivors:” writes poet H.E. Casson, “There’s no done. There’s no fixed. There’s just trying to create enough growth and stability that the setbacks don’t knock us all the way off course.” Viscerality is crucial to Hansel and Gretel, and while their hunger is given just one sentence in the Grimm/Tatar story, Ulmer lets it rumble through her work. The erasure ‘eats’, the “shadows shift and grow of their own volition”, Hansel sees his daughter only as  a “tiny spread”. His world, post-hunger, is forever shaped by it. Ulmer has utilised hunger as a metaphysical metaphor for the lasting effect of trauma, “wr[iting] us a bridge” between those with trauma and those without. Ocean Vuong reached the same place while writing his denied sexuality: “teach me / how to hold a man the way thirst // holds water.” Hunger grounds trauma in the body, makes it a physical reality. 

Ulmer also magnificently brings the bodily weight of language into these pages, which her lingering faerie plays demonstrate all too well - “I wrote us a bridge, bargained with a troll, sold my name by the letter”. She makes these woods otherworldly, filmy, of the wispy dream quality that memories have (“There is a sleepy, dreamy logic to the way the piece moves”, said Stephen Benson and Clare Connors of Anne Carson’s “Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)”). She makes our bodies and the children’s bodies unable to ground themselves in this plane. Though Ulmer moves us through these woods in both present-day and memory, they forever hold that ghostly unreal quality that makes them indistinguishable.

Ulmer breathes reality back into this tale. It isn’t just the After that Ulmer gets spot-on; she makes the events of their trauma, and the children’s personalities, more accurate. Hansel, once the calm quick-witted brother for the sake of narrative logistics, is given his childhood back. In this, he is five when abandoned to the woods, and both his experience and looking-back are limited to this perspective, physically that of a boy whose “beanstalk of a sister” has hair that “holds the sun”, and mentally of a boy who had to be told what was going on (“She tells you that your father had to leave”).

“I never said this was a fair story.”

The slanting of their ages is the heaviest pebble Ulmer drops into this story. As a fellow twin, I’m grateful to her for representing so specifically the unique case of trauma experienced with another person. When Gretel enters older-sibling territory, she has no choice but to offer herself instead to be cannibalised. The gender disparity, too, is brought to light. When Hansel withdraws from society, dissociates from his own child, “The neighbourhood children don’t call him a witch” - but Gretel, bearing the weight of responsibility and awareness that her brother was debatably lucky to lack, is judged: “She used to be such a nice girl.” The interpersonal breadcrumbs pebbled in are also pristine: “I carried you on my hip, on my back, until my feet bled red and I made you count birds in the trees so you’d look away.” This is a rightly gendered critique: in giving Hansel back his childhood, Gretel, because girls are expected to be ‘more mature’ than boys, has hers taken away.

“How will we carry it?”

Though the concept and content of Bewildered are already strong, Ulmer also proves herself a powerful witch of the hybrid mode. From the opening erasures’ brilliant representation of tunneled and fragmented singular-perspective memories, to a recipe for the children’s fate that ghosts the witch’s voice, Ulmer shows an adeptness at internal, linguistic structure. One of the trippiest pieces is surprisingly the prosaic “Rule of Three”, where the older Hansel recounts what he was told and what he wished for, conjuring the heaviness of language for a five-year-old lost in the woods: “People keep telling me it’s over. We made it home. There’s nothing in the trees. You can’t have three truths together.” The piece is constructed entirely from supposed truisms grouped in threes or more. No matter how many are listed together, we sense the groups, and can’t help but question which is the lie. There’s an uncertainty, an anxiety, a malevolent entity wisping its way through these lines. Ulmer, too, utilises not only the question of which is the lie, but the horror of realising, with a third you hope not to be true, that since the former two cannot simultaneously be true...

“There’s no done. There’s no fixed.” We meander back and forth in this story, back into the woods, never quite getting closure, never quite able to walk away, never sure we’re out. Hansel even defiantly says so from the - realistically - safe distance from those fairytale woods of modern-day Ikea. For the purpose of uncovering the previously buried aftermath of our beloved childhood stories, there were fairytales upon fairytales for Ulmer to choose from - she mentions other heavy contenders throughout, with Gretel unable to shake her thoughts of “the girl in the tower” - but she was wise to choose one that physically represented the meandering of the traumatised mind. The woods they’re never quite out of, the hunger you can never definitively cure, the breadcrumbs’ futile hope of going back to the way things were. Ulmer has shaped an effective and heavy argument for how we should properly give trauma its weight.

Bewildered isn’t a read I will forget anytime soon, but it’s certainly one I will take with me back into reality. Read this to read the real Hansel and Gretel - their gender disparity, their intergenerational trauma and its various manifestations. What happened to Hansel and Gretel and how society treats them in its aftermath jars them forevermore.

Bewildered will be available for purchase in 2022. All chaps from the cup & dagger series can be found here.

Jessie Ulmer can be found on Twitter @JessieSwanUlmer.

Other Works Referenced

Abrahamson, Lenny, dir. 2015. Room.

Benson, Stephen, and Clare Connors. “Anne Carson, ‘Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)’”, Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide. UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, 82-102.

Carson, Anne. “Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)”, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006, 17-42.

Casson, H.E. (@hecasson). “Here’s a thing trauma survivors:” Twitter, Sep 21st 2021, https://twitter.com/hecasson/status/1440109781188894727.

Donoghue, Emma. Room. UK: Picador, 2010.

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. “Hansel and Gretel”, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, edited and translated by Maria Tatar. UK: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. “Hansel and Gretel”, The Annotated Brothers Grimm: The Bicentennial Edition, edited and translated by Maria Tatar. UK: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.

Sanders, Rupert, dir. 2012. Snow White and the Huntsman.

Stromberg, Robert, dir. 2014. Maleficent.

Vuong, Ocean. “A Little Closer to the Edge”, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, UK: Cape Poetry, 2017.