Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin
Lately, I have been enjoying exciting and experimental works of nonfiction by women, and Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic fits the bill. Deftly mixing memoir, cultural critique and reportage, each of the book’s five sections take a different axiom (a statement that is often accepted as truth) as a jumping off point to explore time and trauma, loss and grief, friendship and family, as well as war and duties of care. Born in the Ukraine to a Jewish family, and having migrated to Australia as a teenager, it is also about how her own writing is informed by personal experiences of leaving people and places behind.
The book opens with “Time Heals All Wounds,” an axiom she interrogates through an examination of teenage suicides in Australia. This felt the most compelling and revelatory for me (partly because it also felt the most contemporary) but also because I’d rarely seen the subject written about so candidly or openly. Tumarkin explores the struggle of schools, teachers, and families in dealing with the aftermath of teen suicides, which are devastating and often difficult to account for: in a fifteen-year-old boy’s suicide note, he simply writes, “the mechanism telling me not to kill myself is broken.”
Throughout the book, there are many children that need protecting – from violence, abuse, or war – as well as profound concern for all vulnerable members of society who have been abandoned or failed by state systems and institutions. While it can be a confronting and challenging read at times, Tumarkin’s voice remains refreshingly unsentimental. She proceeds at a breathless pace, constantly examining her own position and the ethics of who is able to speak and why. Dan Bennet claims that the book’s strength is rooted in its sympathy for its subjects; it is not a saccharine or tokenistic kind of sympathy, but sympathy as “something sharp, rigorous and precise. Sympathy as a scalpel.” Her subject’s perspectives, and their resolve in the face of suffering, truly animates the book.
Tumarkin was recently awarded the Windham Campbell prize for her body of work that also explores suffering, endurance, and survival (I previously enjoyed her memoir Otherland: A Journey With My Daughter). It is an achievement that is well-deserved. As a reckoning with loss, trauma, and those left behind, Axiomatic is a raw, challenging, and thought-provoking read.