Preface:
This year, in January, I promised to myself that I will start an offline journal where I will process my more difficult personal thoughts. The ones that I do not/cannot share on this blog. I also bought a nice hard-bound journal from a local bookstore specifically for that purpose. Like a lot of other resolutions, this too has been difficult to keep up with. But, for the last few days, I have been journalling regularly. Probably because it's summer, and it's too hot, and I am too broke and empty to do much else. But, the down side of that is, I have lost my appetite to blog here. After all, there can be only so much processing and confessing an individual human being is capable of during the course of a day. And as I am journalling, I am getting back to some of the questions I had been thinking of while taking my non-fiction class earlier this summer. And then I remembered something. Earlier, I had promised in this blog that I will share some of my reflections and thoughts about memoir here in this blog. Somehow, I never got around to it. So, here it is today.
One of the poems we read together as a class is this one:
Memoirs are admittedly about the past. But, can a memoir also be written in present tense? Just so to give it a sense of immediacy? At some point, while writing my stories and poems, I discovered, different languages use tenses differently. In Bangla/Bengali (my native language), we mix up our tenses frequently : the past and present and present-past and pas-present reside together in the way we speak and write. I attribute it to a more cyclical way of thinking, rather than the more linear "Western" understandings of time. But I wasn't really conscious about it when I began to write. I became conscious of it when others in the workshop pointed it out to me. Ever since, tense has been one of those things. I would try to write most of my poems and stories in the past tense. But then, when I would read them again, I would feel that something is missing. And when I wouldn't be conscious of it, the tense would get all mixed up.
As does the idea of "musing", which seems to be an essential component of memoir-writing. I have to admit, of all the tools that are available to the memoir writer, this is the one that makes me most uncomfortable. Because, it needs analysis. I cannot hide behind irony or just crafting a beautiful scene through language. Instead, I will have to analyze myself and the people around me for the "musings" to be effective. Hence, it is all about making myself more vulnerable to the rest of the world. Then again, "musing" seems to be THE tool which makes memoirs different from fiction. Of course, a lot of the nineteenth century realist fiction writers used musing as part of their narration too, and I still love reading these novels. There is a pleasure in reading a 800 page novel, where the narrator is all knowing, and I can trust upon his or her musings, and glide through the story. But, from what I have gathered, it is not exactly the tool that most contemporary American fiction writers use. Instead, "musing" has been taken up by memoirists, and it can be a very very potent tool to understand one's own memories.
Conclusion:
In other words, it's never enough to possess memories of a life-time. In order to be a memoir-writer, we need to be able to be the architects of our own memories. And that, like any other genre of writing, is hard.
This year, in January, I promised to myself that I will start an offline journal where I will process my more difficult personal thoughts. The ones that I do not/cannot share on this blog. I also bought a nice hard-bound journal from a local bookstore specifically for that purpose. Like a lot of other resolutions, this too has been difficult to keep up with. But, for the last few days, I have been journalling regularly. Probably because it's summer, and it's too hot, and I am too broke and empty to do much else. But, the down side of that is, I have lost my appetite to blog here. After all, there can be only so much processing and confessing an individual human being is capable of during the course of a day. And as I am journalling, I am getting back to some of the questions I had been thinking of while taking my non-fiction class earlier this summer. And then I remembered something. Earlier, I had promised in this blog that I will share some of my reflections and thoughts about memoir here in this blog. Somehow, I never got around to it. So, here it is today.
One of the poems we read together as a class is this one:
Everything Is – by Candy Shue
(from The Rambler)
autobiographical.
The newspaper
you read this morning.
The coffee you drank
while you were reading it.
The article about the couple
getting married at McDonald’s.
The toast you buttered
to eat with your coffee.
The knife you used
to butter it.
The truck that was double-parked
in your driveway.
The guy with the hand truck
who parked it there.
The smell of the cigarette
stuck in his mouth.
The music on the car radio
playing “Me and Mrs. Jones.”
It is all a part of you,
inextricable.
Even the strangers
standing next to you
at the post office
as you imagine what
you’re going to do
with your life
someday.
You’re alive, right here,
right now.
Aren’t you?
You’re here.
And here, right here.
Everyday :
This poem asks us to see bigger meanings in our everyday lives, in our
so-called mundane activities. When I sat down to write following the
prompt we had, I began by writing about the most mundane of the day's
activities: making and drinking the morning cup of tea. And, the
whole exercise did force me to zero in, to dig deeper, and be more
introspective. Normally, in my stories and poems I write in an
ironic, half-sarcastic kind of a voice. And, I almost automatically bumped into an earnest voice. So, this earnest tone in
which I wrote most of my pieces for this class, was hard for me. It demanded a kind of
writerly vulnerability which I have not experienced in other genres.
To me it seemed, the very form demands that put myself out there that
is scary. Although, most literary critics would talk about how we should really be concerned about
the "narrator/speaker" and not the "you" as in
the writer, to me, it seemed, there is no way I can avoid my own life
being examined in a way that does not happen in a story or a poem
even if I am translating a real-life experience verbatim. And that's
precisely because in my fiction or my poems, I do not make any truth claims even
if they are true. To be perfectly honest, rarely have I written anything in my stories and poems that are "true" in that factual sense. So far as I am concerned, what I have written about so far are emotional, sociological and historical truths. Not factual ones.
Although
theoretically I know my own life is as good as any other to provide
the raw material for literature, it does feel scary to be writing
about myself precisely because there is a narcissism in that act
which I can get around while writing fiction and poetry by claiming
that I am indeed writing about social contexts, specific characters and settings. But, what I find liberating about non-fiction is the fact that my everyday life with all its boredom and mundane-ness, can be the subject of my pieces. No one is going to ask me for a "conflict" or "tension", as one would demand from a fiction writer. At least, in the more traditional sense of the term. This is indeed liberating.
Bigger Picture
Yet, that writing of the mundane must also be rooted within the writer's developing sociological eye. What can my little story about my very
personal relationship with my girl-friend in college communicate about the "bigger picture"?
Do the stories about my relationships with my parents, for example,
reveal bigger patterns of class and gender? Were they shaped in a
specific way because we ourselves have been framed by bigger
histories?
Time
Memoirs are admittedly about the past. But, can a memoir also be written in present tense? Just so to give it a sense of immediacy? At some point, while writing my stories and poems, I discovered, different languages use tenses differently. In Bangla/Bengali (my native language), we mix up our tenses frequently : the past and present and present-past and pas-present reside together in the way we speak and write. I attribute it to a more cyclical way of thinking, rather than the more linear "Western" understandings of time. But I wasn't really conscious about it when I began to write. I became conscious of it when others in the workshop pointed it out to me. Ever since, tense has been one of those things. I would try to write most of my poems and stories in the past tense. But then, when I would read them again, I would feel that something is missing. And when I wouldn't be conscious of it, the tense would get all mixed up.
And
since memoirs are admittedly about our memories-- I
am thinking about this "time factor" again. Yes, I am
writing about memory. But these are not dead memories, so to say.
When I narrate my memories, I think of them as "active past",
a past which still has the capacity to shape me, my thoughts, my
personal growth. So, relegating them all to a homogenous past tense
does not seem right. It does not communicate all the complexities for
me.
Musing
As does the idea of "musing", which seems to be an essential component of memoir-writing. I have to admit, of all the tools that are available to the memoir writer, this is the one that makes me most uncomfortable. Because, it needs analysis. I cannot hide behind irony or just crafting a beautiful scene through language. Instead, I will have to analyze myself and the people around me for the "musings" to be effective. Hence, it is all about making myself more vulnerable to the rest of the world. Then again, "musing" seems to be THE tool which makes memoirs different from fiction. Of course, a lot of the nineteenth century realist fiction writers used musing as part of their narration too, and I still love reading these novels. There is a pleasure in reading a 800 page novel, where the narrator is all knowing, and I can trust upon his or her musings, and glide through the story. But, from what I have gathered, it is not exactly the tool that most contemporary American fiction writers use. Instead, "musing" has been taken up by memoirists, and it can be a very very potent tool to understand one's own memories.
Conclusion:
In other words, it's never enough to possess memories of a life-time. In order to be a memoir-writer, we need to be able to be the architects of our own memories. And that, like any other genre of writing, is hard.
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