Support For an Authentic Writing Practice, Profession, & Community
RAP #4: THE DRIVE TO RE-MEMBER & TELL STORIES
Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir The Woman Warrior begins, "'You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you.'" And with that beginning, of course, we're hooked at least for a few more pages. "'In China your father had a sister who killed herself,'" the story continues, "She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.'"
The first chapter, then, recounts the harrowing tale of how this woman, Kingston's dead aunt whose husband had been gone for years, got pregnant. The family didn't punish her; the village did. "'On the night the baby was to be born,'" the mother tells Kingston, '"the villagers raided our house. Some were crying. Like a great saw, teeth strung with lights, files of people walked zigzag across our land, tearing the rice. . . The villagers broke in the front and the back doors at the same time, even though we had not locked the doors against them. Their knives dripped with the blood of our animals. They smeared blood on the doors and walls. One woman swung a chicken, whose throat she had slit, splattering blood in red arcs about her.'"
Something drives Kingston's mother to tell her daughter the forbidden story, and something drives Kingston to tell it to us.
See yourself. Young. An adult is telling you a story. A story either about yourself when you were younger or about another family member. See the place. The surroundings. Hear the adult's tone of voice. Recount the details and images. Write for a few minutes.
Why do we tell stories? What does it mean to remember?
One foundational layer of our sense of self is stories.
Somewhere, far back in the recesses of each of our memories are stories we’ve been told. Before we could utter our first ga’s and goo’s, we likely overheard our parents regaling their friends with stories about how we arrived in the world, about the utter chaos of the moment our mother’s water broke, about the pushing and heaving, the needles and the drugs, and the labor, and the sighs, and the cries.
And as we grew up, perhaps our families shared stories about other family members, dead and alive. How Uncle Forest, with one too many scotch on the rocks down the hatch on Thanksgiving, got a little threatening with Auntie Bev while wielding the new electric carving knife. How your great-grandmother at age thirteen got swatted on the knuckles by a teacher and left school to join the traveling carnival only to return at age fifteen carrying her newborn son. How your father as a boy lived down the road from your mother and took your mother to see Disney’s Alice in Wonderland on her tenth birthday. How your father twenty years later left fist-sized holes in the kitchen walls at night.
And then we even hear stories about ourselves replayed over and over by our parents. How as a girl you called crescent moons fingernail moons. How when you were sixteen you went to the beach for your first spring break trip only to lose, on your first drunken night there, your wallet in the ocean. And so on. Soon, others’ stories about yourself begin to shape your own memory. And all of these stories--the ones we hear before we can speak ourselves, the stories we hear of other family members, and the stories we later hear replayed about ourselves all contribute to the picture we have ourselves, of our past as if the past were some glimpse into who we are now.
It’s in telling a story as writers that we draw in our own souls and our readers’ souls. It’s in the story--the details of the drama, the dialogue--that our readers recognize themselves and their own struggles--and that our readers can expand their compassion to other human beings whose well told stories differ in specifics from their own.
Stories have their roots in religion. When Jesus spoke to a troubled person, he told that person a story, a parable seemingly about another person, a stranger, and yet by the parable’s end, Jesus like a sly coyote teacher, subtly helped the troubled person recognize herself in that parable. And so every religious tradition and every indigenous tribe has its stories of who we are and how we’ve struggled and what we’ve gained and how we’ve changed from such struggle. We’re interested in each other’s stories; they bring us closer together. It makes sense that the word “gossip” stems from “god” and “sib” as in a story that brings you close to God, makes you kin to God. A recognition occurs between the self and the other.
So we as writers must remember our stories. Our own stories. Our family stories. Other families’ stories. Other individual’s stories. We must god-sib with our readers.
A story stems from one person’s memory often filtered by another person’s memory. All we have to account that we actually have existed, that our lives do in fact matter, comes from memory. In Healing Fiction, James Hillman writers that “Remembering is a commemoration, a ritual recall of our lives to the images in the background of the soul. By remembering, we give a kind of commemorative legend, a founding image to our present lives. . .” and “I need to remember my stories not because I need to find out about myself but because I need to found myself in a story I can hold to be mine.”
And so in this process of writing into stories, we found ourselves in a story not told by our uncles or aunts or mother or fathers but by ourselves. And we aim as writers to hold ourselves as accountable to the truth as we can. To be as honest with the facts as best as we can remember them and validate them--while still imagining an entertaining tale.
So for those of you telling stories, family and otherwise, recognize your own storyteller’s tradition. Locate your storyteller voice, the one that draws us into a tale, that lures us in with suspenseful hints and revealing dialogue and emotionally resonant images. And at some point in your process, build and rebuild your story scene by scene--sharp beginning, surprising middle, subtle ending--with some sense of how you’re drawing in your readers just as an Australian aboriginal elder might do for his audience on a stark dark night, his listeners at once enthralled by the telling and at once joyful and terrified by the recognition of themselves in the telling.
From the fragments of our memory, the shards and lose limbs of our memory’s corpse, we remember. We re-member. We stitch together our memory’s membranes into a whole. And we re-member ourselves. That is, we rejoin our membership in the tribe of humanity. And for our readers, some of whom may feel isolated and disjointed and dismembered from the tribe, for them, too, we-remember.
And how do you persevere on this journey of re-membering? That's the topic of RAP #5: TENDING THE GARDEN: THE FIRE TO PERSEVERE.
RAP#1: THE DRAFT AS QUEST: FINDING YOUR REAL STORY & SUBJECT
RAP #2: BEING HONEST, BEING AUTHENTIC
RAP #3: THE SACRED VOICE'S MOVEMENT: FROM WHAT HAPPENED TO SO WHAT
RAP #4: THE DRIVE TO RE-MEMBER & TO TELL STORIES
RAP #5: TENDING THE GARDEN: THE FIRE TO PERSEVERE
Copyright 2006 Jeff Davis
No part of this piece may be reproduced without the express consent of the author.
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