Читать книгу Writing Ourselves Whole - Jen Cross - Страница 12

writing that changes its writer

Freewriting is the one practice (well, besides really good dancing) that most consistently drops me into a transformative experience—that is, a sense of being different somehow, on the other side of writing, than I was at the beginning. When I am able to let the writing flow, get the editor out of the way and write without stopping for at least fifteen or twenty minutes, I often find that something in me has shifted, loosened (as though I’ve done some psychic stretching); many times I write something I hadn’t known I wanted or needed to say.

Transformative writing is writing that changes the writer in the process of its creation. A transformation is a thorough or significant change—one dictionary I consult gives a definition of transform as “to change completely for the better” (emphasis mine). I think of writing that’s transformative as writing that surprises the writer as it’s emerging, either with respect to form, content, structure, or some other factor. It’s writing through which the writer may learn something about themselves (even—sometimes especially—if the writing is fiction).

So, when I talk about a transformative writing practice, I mean a regular and consistent freewriting routine that, intentionally or not, enacts a transformation or series of slow, deep changes in the writer. I mean a practice of deep communion with the page, which is also both a deep communion with self and not-self.

I describe this as a writing practice, rooted in the body, that engages the fullness of our creative power. When I am at the page and the words are flowing, when I let the words come exactly as they arise in me, when I’m not worried about control or how I look or whether I’m writing right but rather have the sense that something is writing through me, that I am a vehicle for the words that needed to get written, then I say I am doing transformative writing practice.

This writing, right now, is not about craft—absolutely not about grammar or punctuation or the other parts of the editing process. This is learning to release and reclaim all the words, every one: all the language of and for these selves that we are. We who learned to talk in code and split tongues, who learned to communicate through gesture and glance and dyed hair and torn clothing, through the size of our bellies, through thin scarring on our wrists or thighs, we who were not allowed to say our lives or experiences directly—we now have the opportunity for a new articulation. Through a transformative writing practice, we can realign with our instincts, our intuitions, our values, our wishes; we can learn how our true inside self/selves look and feel and sounds.

Here is an example of one of my workshop writes, sparked after listening to Sweet Honey in the Rock’s “Ella’s Song”:

This is what I want to say: It won’t end. You won’t get fixed. You won’t reach a place where your name is only Healed and incest doesn’t ever feed you breakfast anymore. The people who tell you You’ll get over it don’t know what they’re talking about, because they live in their own closed cage of denial. You have been transformed. You are not the same as you were Before. And you will never not also be who you were Before—but it may be some years before these layerings of yourselves can sit in the same room with you and have coffee in the morning. There is no such thing as getting over it. There is the business of living through and with. There is learning to breathe again, there is learning you are worthy of the air you breathe, there is having to breathe when you know you are not worthy. There is you, just breathing. You will have years called Night and years called Drunk and years called Weep and years called Frozen and years called Broken and Fuck. You look at this and think you can’t bear so many years of pain—but what’s true is that all those years are also called Freedom.

You will not always be in pain. Your heart will harden and soften at the same time. You will forget all the names you ever had, you will climb into a skin so different from the one you were fucked into that not even your mother—especially not your mother—will be able to recognize you. This may or may not be a cocoon. It might just be the true face of your new eyes. Every stage is a phase, like this breath you are taking is a phase, like this heartbeat is a phase, like a single kiss is a phase is an instant an instantiation of your personhood. Phase means nothing except you are still alive. Ignore them when they tell you that whatever you’re experiencing now is just a phase. Ignore their relief, if it comes, when you enter a different phase. They do not sing with all the tendons of your body and they can’t speak the truth of your soul. Sit with the people who can hold your surfaces and your undersides, both.

One day you will say yes to your skin, yes to sex, yes to the feel of your body alive and inhabitable. The next day you will wrench up with No again. There will be years like this. There will be two yes hours in a row. There will be days when you don’t say his name. There will be come a night when, in your dreamtime, you will take the knife brandished against you and turn it on the ones you’ve been running from. That will be a good day.

Know that this place you’re in right now will transform. Be with people who can hold the shimmer of insurrection that is the space between who you were raped to be and who you are becoming. Be with those who can open their hands out to rage, who are imperfect in their holding, who want to fix it, and who understand that there is nothing to fix. Understand that you will emerge from broken, that broken is a necessity, that no human passes through life whole and that none of us are anything other than whole. Believe that broken is necessary if one wants to see all sides of a thing. Know that you are because of and in spite of, you are of and not of, you are welcome in this human family, you have never been outside its true skin. We live among people who have forgotten how to open their hands to those who need receiving, people who deserve explicit welcome, and, yes, deserve apology. Know that the platitudes people offer you exist so that you can climb inside something together, that they are a doorway that you can see each other through when the words don’t work anymore. Know that words will sometimes fail you but you will keep trying to unwrap them to find what lives inside because for all the pain there you will never stop wanting to know and to share what lives truly inside yourself. (2013)

I began this freewrite with a desire to offer something hopeful to the survivors I know and love, and to those who are just beginning their process of recovery, and found myself at first writing things that didn’t feel very damn hopeful at all. And then, of course, I found I was writing this as much for myself as for others in need of words of encouragement: Know that this place you’re in right now will transform. No matter how many years I’ve been actively recovering, I still need reminding. One more time, I get to be tender to the still-aching parts of myself.

•§•

I initially met the word transformative in conjunction with writing when, in 2000, I read in Poets and Writers Magazine about Goddard College’s Transformative Language Arts (TLA) program. Transformative Language Arts is described as “the intentional use of the written, spoken and sung word for individual and community growth, development, celebration, and transformation,” and called to me when I was searching for a way to integrate anti-violence activist work and writing. I imagined developing a creative writing methodology to use with LGBTQ women who wanted to write about sex as a way to reclaim and recalibrate their relationship with desire.

(Please note that I don’t mention initially envisioning work with trauma survivors—when I first began my studies, I wasn’t intending to work with survivors; that was a transformation in itself, the moment I allowed myself to understand that I was going to (have to) navigate my own survivor experience, that I would write with survivors. That particular understanding brought on big mourning and loss, as I’d somehow convinced myself that I could write about sex without writing about trauma. Denial works in powerful ways, doesn’t it?)

While studying for my master’s degree in Transformative Language Arts, Ladelle McWhorter’s book Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization introduced me to the concept of “askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.” McWhorter describes askesis (which she learned about through studying the philosophy of Michel Foucault) as “a self-transformative, self-overcoming practice, whose purpose is ‘to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.’”

When I speak of writing as transformative, I mean a practice in which the writer opens themselves to just this sort of in-depth exploration and metamorphosis.

Of course, not everyone wants their writing to catapult them from caterpillar into the thing with wings. Sometimes you just want to jot down the notes of the day. I understand that. The thing is—sometimes the wings begin to emerge anyway, and it is useful to have a practice in place to help them unfurl fully, when you are ready to risk leaping into the air. Transformative writing practice has helped me—and many of those I’ve written with—not only excavate my wings out from under years of scar tissue, but also learn how to fly.

Transformative writing is often risky, genre-defying, full of metaphors, stream of consciousness, deeply connected and unconsciously-driven. Over time, through the use of this practice, we are not only able to improve our writing, but we are also able to witness ourselves in the process of changing. This is writing that takes chances, is not censored by our inner editor. Sometimes the results of this kind of writing are linear, straightforward. Sometimes the results are an almost surreal conglomeration of verbs, nouns, and adjectives with no distinct structure, conjugation or form—often the resulting writing is somewhere between these extremes. Every time, every time, though, this practice of dropping onto the page and following the words wherever they seem to want us to go results in emotionally-resonant work. I have found the process of freewriting to be an erotic, embodied experience, after Audre Lorde’s definition of erotic: “I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way. And when I say living I mean it as that force which moves us toward what will accomplish real positive change.”

When we write freely this way, over a period of time, we give ourselves the space to examine our inner curvature, the contours of our minds and experiences. We write ourselves into new ways of perceiving, new ways of knowing—profoundly intimate experiences, both, if we allow them to be, because they open the door to new ways of being in the world. Transformative practice in action: the slow and gorgeous effort of learning to communicate (with) all parts of our inside selves again.

The music of transformation

Locate and download a copy of Sweet Honey in the Rock singing “Ella’s Song” (buy it if you can—support your revolutionary artists!—or find a video of the song online). Play it once you are in your writing place, with your notebook ready, pen uncapped, coffee steaming next to you, whatever you need to help your words flow. Let the lyrics wash over you. Notice what images or feelings rise up in you as you listen. If a line or a phrase catches your attention, copy that down into your notebook. You might begin writing from any of these associations or words, or you can begin with the phrase, “We who believe in freedom…” Follow your writing wherever it seems to want you to go, even if you end up writing about something completely different from what you’d originally intended.