*Note: Spoilers ahead*
This is the cumulative experience of Shuggie from the 2020 Booker Prize-winning novel Shuggie Bain. Through this, I would like to highlight how life had been unfair for the boy, who lived through loss and anxiety all through his childhood in hopes of some escape from the desolation he had experienced.
Alone without a father and his two siblings, Shuggie takes on the role of a caretaker, ensuring his mother doesn’t drink herself into an early grave. In his loneliness and misery, the only thing that remains untainted is the almost blinding devotion and love he has towards his mother -- the same disruptive alcoholic who, in her clouded, drunken haze, is unable to see anyone but herself as having some value.
Her desperate, humiliating practices leave her incapable to raise her children, two of whom remove themselves from the situation as early as possible. Shuggie stays behind to care for his mother because he loves her -- for her matted mink coat and her black strappy heels, for her soft, slurred words of silent acknowledgement, for her proud gait. Not having anything to eat doesn’t scare him as much as his mother not making a sound. So even as his mother spends the welfare money on alcohol, he stays. He stays because he doesn’t believe he needs saving from the woman he loves. He lives in that perpetual state of dread and anxiety because, even as he is hopeful for a better future, he is a fierce lover.
When his father and, later, his siblings leave, he cannot make sense of the loss and dejection. Instead, he experiences a deep sense of shame for all that is happening, believing himself to be the reason. There is a profound feeling of guilt and distrust -- in silence, in himself and the men who eye Agnes. He doubts his ability to protect and care for her and painfully accepts that he isn’t doing enough. It is heartbreaking because, for everything he has done, Shuggie’s efforts are futile. What never crosses his mind is that maybe, just like him, she doesn’t need saving from anyone else. That with everyone walking out on his mammy and him, every shred of hope had too.
“Sadness made for a better houseguest; at least it was quiet, reliable, consistent.”
Shuggie struggles with having to come to terms with his sexuality, with the reality of being perceived differently than his peers. Knowing it would mean accepting it, and accepting it would mean giving up trying to change. But he desperately wants to change, if that means he can feel more “normal” and be what others expect him to be. His childhood is one large sea of despair and anxiety, and he wades through it severed from any support system. He perceives his brother Leek looking out for him but when he realises that the world Leek envisions for the both of them does not include their mother, he wants none of it.
It is ironic that people seek love, validation and acceptance in the places they have been refused it. Such is the case with Shuggie too, who never gives up on his mother despite how poor a job she does in raising him. In all this chaos, hope serves as the most powerful tool for his survival and yet, unbeknownst to his pure soul, it is also the sole destructive element chipping away at his childhood. It is something he has somehow learnt to live with.
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