Razzle Dazzle?: Identity and Agency in the Creative Responses to (Post)Deployment by Women Veterans

“Start a Hare”, a ‘nursery noir’ story-within-a-story, is an extract from a novel of the same title for young adults which forms one strand of a creative practice research project with women military veterans: “Razzle Dazzle? Identity and Agency in the Creative Responses to (Post)Deployment by Women Veterans”. The project’s title refers to Razzle Dazzle camouflage used by the UK and US Navy during the First and, to a lesser extent, the Second World War (cf. Willis). Unlike other forms of camouflage, the intention of Dazzle painting is not to conceal the presence of a ship but to make it more difficult to estimate its range, speed, and heading. A ship painted in bright colours is more visible but the fractured design, and use of counter-shading makes it a more difficult target to hit because it is harder to estimate its speed and direction. Dazzle camouflage has emerged in this project as a visual metaphor to view the creative responses of some women military veterans to (post)deployment identities.

tured design, and use of counter-shading makes it a more difficult target to hit because it is harder to estimate its speed and direction.Dazzle camouflage has emerged in this project as a visual metaphor to view the creative responses of some women military veterans to (post)deployment identities.
Dr Helen Limon is a Research Associate and Teaching Fellow at Newcastle University's School for English Literature, Language and Linguistics.She is module leader for the MA Writing for Children and Young People and for the undergraduate module, "Creative and Critical".Helen is a member of the EU COST European Literacy Network and associated with Seven Stories National Centre for Children's Books and the International Board for Books for Young People (IBBY).She has published for adults and children in a variety of forms.Her first novel for children, Om Shanti Babe, won the Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Award and is published by Frances Lincoln Children's Books.
Women veterans' life stories during and post-service are collected and deployed by a variety of organisations to impact charitable giving and government policy in the UK and internationally (cf.Your Stories).Reflecting language found in the wider community support service environment, states of transition -in this case from civilian to soldier to veteran/civilian -are understood as metaphorical 'journeys' and the transformative self-knowledge, good mental health and individual and collective agency, that result, are the journey's 'destination'.For example, the first page of the Joint Services Support Organisation's advisory publication states that, "It's important to recognize that the mental journey back to civilian life will take longer than the physical journey" ("Adjusting to Civilian Life" 1).However, as my conversations with a widening range of women veterans grew more nuanced, it became apparent that some of the women veterans in the research network experienced unease about the way their stories are used.In particular, they were uncomfortable about the way they are required to tell, retell, (re)affirm and so 'fix' their stories so that they might be 'explained' by others.
The roots of this unease grew during a number of creative 'hacks' of children's books at Seven Stories -National Centre for Children's Books.Book 'hacking' refers to the process of close, critical group reading followed by annotating the texts.The subjects of the 'hacks' included a range of sticker books produced by publishers, Usborne (Kelly n.pag.).These activity books illuminated the absence of military women and professional women in 'Action' or 'Hero' roles.As a result of the publicity surrounding these hacks we changed the designs to more accurately portray the participation of women in emergency and peacekeeping roles.Reflecting on this experience and the gender struggles of an Arthurian field nurse in Philip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur (2011), and of the compelling call of 'duty' in Michael Morpurgo's Kensuke's Kingdom (2001), the women in the hack group understood their stories as both 'authored' and 'read' by and through other cultural and artistic products, including children's books.They saw their stories as emerging and evolving in a creative and cultural dialogue, not as 'assets', something fixed that they 'carried' with them.
Razzle Dazzle evokes imagery of the vulnerable ship at sea and as a metaphor alerts us to the significance of hijacking, piracy and the interrupted journey: the journey that ends when the cargo is taken before the ship reaches its destination and is left drifting, with a greatly reduced value.
My own creative response reflects the unease of the core group of artist-veteran collaborators.Writing the Start a Hare stories as prose fiction, 'nursery noir', I re-purpose not the bright colours of Razzle Dazzle camouflage bu t the fractured design and counter shading for my own creative contributions to the research."Start a Hare" is not a story written for young children.As with the other stories-within-stories, it is adapted from the childhood experience of a friend.I use some of the attributes of the genre of children's literature as a form of camouflage but subvert this by introducing tonal dissonance.For example, I use some of the characteristics of 'noir' as a tonal register for these stories in both the text and through Anne Wilson's black and white illustrations.As a creative and critical discourse, 'noir' reflects the ambiguity, violence, and the unsettling effect of strong, independent women that is a characteristic of the gendered context of military (veteran) research (cf.Woodword and Winter).I chose to include the illustrations in order to amplify the ambiguity of the stories and to emphasise the sense of unease for the reader.
In my novel, the stories-within-a-story, my central character, a girl, floats on driftwood.Her sailing boat has hit an old mine and when she wakes up she is alone.She is on a journey that is not of her choosing and she has no control of her speed or direction of travel.A hare clambers aboard.She remembers the Russian story about a flood and hunter, "Grandfather Mazia and the Hares", and, until the hare speaks, she thinks she is imagining it.The mountain hare is a central character in the meta-narrative and the story-in-the-story portrays its origins though other animals play central roles in the other six stories.The hare dwells in grassy depressions or 'forms', makes dramatic leaps or swift directional changes to avoid capture, and box-fights.Female hares box-fight to ward off unwanted attentions of male hares.In "The Dog and The Hare" in Aesop's Fables, the hare demands that the hound makes its intentions clear as friend or foe.
While the work is at an early stage, we (myself and four of the artist-veterans) have been invited to present, read and exhibit at the ERGOMAS international military conference in Athens in June 2017 and to contribute a chapter to an academic publication with the publisher, Springer."What is going on?!" she shouted.Her eyes were wild and her voice wobbled.
In a crack of time so tiny and so huge that it cannot be named no one said anything.The girl's Aunty stopped laughing.She began to make a peculiar whumping noise almost as though someone had kicked her from the inside.She swallowed and then whumped and then she coughed, opening her mouth wide.

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Adjusting to Civilian Life After Combat Duty with the Guard or Reserve."Joint Services Support, jointservicessupport.org/php/articles/adjusting-tocivilian-life-after-combat-duty.pdf.Her Aunty gulped and coughed and that was that.The rabbit was swallowed up.The girl's Aunty had eaten her rabbit!Illustration: Anne Wilson The girl screamed and screamed and screamed.She screamed until the windows cracked and the curtains blew out into the dark and flapped away toward the frozen forest like startled crows.The girl's Aunty laughed.She laughed until fat tears of wickedness ran down her face and pooled into salty lakes on the polished wooden floor.The girl's Mother ran into the room with her hands over her ears and soap suds flying from her elbows.She had stopped singing at the first scream.