Читать книгу Writing Ourselves Whole - Jen Cross - Страница 14

we are not trauma but we know the words for it

We get all the words. We get to write everything. We get to not be ok and be absolutely ok at the same time. We get to take this work slowly—write a memory for ten minutes, then breathe and cry and beat pillows for twenty. This isn’t work we need to rush through. We’re building a relationship with our deep inner self, our surviving self, our material, our memory, our creative genius. We are meeting our own idioms, a linguistics of loss and determination, a semantics of our own particular triumph. We write phrases that don’t make sense anywhere outside the context of our own subconscious—even we may not consciously understand our writing sometimes. We keep writing until we understand what the sense that lives in us could be. We write something that completely contradicts what we wrote yesterday, and then we keep writing until we understand that we have not contradicted, we simply exist in multitudes—we are Whitman’s heirs.

Some days you might write all around the edges of the violence you suffered. Some days you might avoid euphemisms: instead of entering the written picture with the relative soft-focus of “that was the day he molested me,” you might choose to describe precisely what of him went where on you. You might describe the full gloss of your body’s reaction. You might describe it as though it’s happening to someone else, or it’s happening to someone you’re talking to. You might choose a third person point of view (that is, using she, he, it, or they) that puts some distance between the reader and the experience, or use the passive voice (e.g., “The body was abandoned”) to center the action and draw attention away from the actors. One scene of your story could use all of these framings. Use all the tools at your disposal.

Then write it differently. Write yourself fighting back, then write yourself fighting back differently or not fighting back at all. Write someone walking in. Write from the point of view of the bed, the couch, the closet, the garage floor, the basement walls, the kitchen table, the office chair—the inanimate witnesses to your experience. If someone had walked by, walked in, what would they have heard or seen? Write it inside out. Every different telling brings forth new details, new remembering, and new art.

Then write about the birdsong in the summer birch tree, the smell of sea salt roses, the deep blue of the thin autumn sky. Or take yourself for ice cream or go for a run or have a long cry or a swim.

When you write trauma, your body will fill up with memory and emotion. Consider how you want to take care of yourself after, how to thank your body for this effort of recollection and creation, for tangling itself back up in the old (sometimes not so old) memories, how to communicate to your psyche: I will take care of us through this process of reclaiming and restorying. I take long walks, cry into the notebook, get into the garden or watch silly sitcoms. I go for long drives, roll the windows down, turn the radio up, and sing loud. I browse bookstores, play ball with the puppy, make myself a cup of strong green tea.

Notice when, during the writing, you find yourself suddenly so sleepy you think you could lay your head down and fall asleep right there. Listen to what your body tells you: are your muscles tense? Does your skin go tingly, or numb? This is your intuition speaking to you. Sometimes these body messages will mean, Write more now. Sometimes they will mean, Get me the fuck out of here. You’ll learn the difference—maybe the hard way, by trying to ignore the body totally, like I did (which—spoiler alert—didn’t work all that well).

We claim every word that could fit into any mouth. We do this every day, or most days—we claim regular and consistent space for our creative emergence and delight. We write until we don’t understand what we’re saying anymore. We write until we’re bored with the trauma. We repeat ourselves, think we are tapped out, and then we stumble over a scent and we describe it and that leads in to a story that taps into a vein of new memory, so we write more.

We are not trauma but we know the words for it. We know how to speak to it. We know how to reach inside of it. We know how to recognize its underseams. We have stories that can save children, save sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, the mothers lost to themselves, the men who think rape will save them—we want to strip them all down. Those who pretend not to know this song cannot help but hear our chorus. We hold no room for pretense. We call out the names anyway. We tell the true stories anyway. We describe tactics, smooth smiles, rage. We teach each other lost languages. The liars don’t have to read our stories, but their women are, and their sons. Girl children are sharpening their blades on the stones of our stories. This time we name endings. We feed the young ones what we know and they will save their own lives. (2014)

We use poetic language or the conventions of science fiction, we write mythologies and fictions, we use legalese or academese or our mother tongue—we write trauma as a business letter. We write trauma as a movie script. We write trauma as a novel, a piece of flash fiction, as a shopping list, a letter to the editor, a to-do list, a song, a piece of art criticism, a recipe, a series of haiku, notes for an essay, a blog post, a guide book, an encyclopedia, a dictionary, a thesaurus; we write it as a travelogue, as erotic fiction, as pornography, as a poli-sci textbook, as chant, as spoken word, as a map, as a series of blueprints, a guide to a demolition. We write it as translation, as a phone book, a contact list, as religious ceremony, as a bible, as a how-to manual. We write it as pulp fiction, as noir, as a series of public service announcements, as ancient spells, as feminist polemic, as a letter in a bottle; we carve it into rock, cave, treebark, write it in sand and beach glass, sing it to deer and ducks and hawks. We tell it with eagle eyes and up close like flea bites.

Write the rage. Write letters that will never get sent. Say everything you wanted to say, everything you did say, everything they should have been able to hear you say.

We take every angle, every form. We use what works, and as we write, we discover, uncover, recover and (re)create ourselves. We are naked and named, we declare ourselves. We find the language for the normal, everyday evil in the world. We don’t just say Me, too—some days we also say, Fuck you. We take our tongues back from between their teeth. We name exactly what they did. Their language is only part of our story. Their daily and commonplace violence is only part of the story. How they meet us with big smiles and generosity later is only part of the story. We must write, too, our aching bodies, the breadth of our laughter, how our mouths still know how to smile: we give the whole story of our lives to the page.

Practice trusting your own words

Set your timer for ten minutes. On a new page in your notebook, start with the phrase, “This is what they told me to say…” (If the prompt isn’t clicking, try changing the pronouns: “This is what they told her to say,” or “him to say,” or, “This is what he told us to say.” Let yourself notice what works). Write for about five minutes, then stop. Take a breath. Begin again, on a new line, with the phrase, “This is what they told me not to say…” Write for five more minutes. If you want to continue, pick up your pen, take another breath, and then dive into anything that came up for you during the first two writes.