Heart Berries: A Memoir(31)
I could know the depth of my pain if I wrote it, revised it, and it felt true, or as true as words can be. I wrote explicitly in some ways to display shame. True shame is the ugliest thing, the most hurtfully honest thing I can say about myself or another person, and then I revised it to cut deeper, and then I cut the fat off it so that the truth felt expedient, but it wasn’t for me. Maybe that was a type of censorship. I didn’t want readers to do the interior work I did to arrive at a specific point.
The book is structured by pain. What I did with that shame arrives at something pure, I think, which is that my mother is a biblical character in my story. Her and her mother and her mother have become larger myths than I originally thought.
Q: You’ve said elsewhere, “Indigenous identity is fixed in grief.” Can you elaborate?
A: I don’t feel liberated from the governing presence of tragedy. The way in which people frame our work, and the way our work exists, or is canonized—we are not liberated from injustice; we’re anchored to it. It feels inescapable and part of the zeitgeist of Indian in the twenty-first century, or every century since they came, which doesn’t limit me, or us, but limits the way we are seen and spoken about. It’s unfortunate, and real to me.
Q: I asked about why you wrote the book, and you said, “One reason I wrote the book is there is so much criticism about the sentimentality of writing about trauma. Writing about it is irrefutably art but also does the work of saying something. Women should be able to say this and say it however we want. There’s so much pushback about how a child abuse narrative can’t be art.” Can you say more?
A: I know the book isn’t simply an abuse narrative, but then it is. I was abused, and brilliant women are abused, often, and we write about it. People seem so resistant to let women write about these experiences, and they sometimes resent when the narrative sounds familiar. It’s almost funny, because, yeah—there is nothing new about what they do to us. We can write about it in new ways, but what value are we placing on newness? Familiarity is boring, but these fucking people—they keep hurting us in the same ways. It’s putting the onus on us to tell it differently, spare people melodrama, explicative language, image, and make it new. I think, well, fuck that. I’ll say how it happened to me, and by doing that maybe it became new. I took the voice out of my head that said writing about abuse is too much, that people will think it’s sentimental, or pulling at someone’s pathos, unwilling to be art. By resisting the pushback, I was able to write more fully and, at times, less artfully about what happened.
I remember my first creative writing professor in nonfiction asked his class not to write about abortions or car wrecks. I thought, You’re going to know about my abortion in detail (if only there had been a car crash that same day). I don’t think there is anything wrong with exploring familiar themes in the human experience. When the individual gets up and tells her story, there’s going to be a detail so real and vivid it places you there, and you identify. I believe in the author’s right to tell any story, and the closer it comes to a singular truth, the more art they render in the telling.
Q: Can you speak to the competing impulses of memoir being therapeutic at the expense of being imaginative or provocative/hurtful/critical?
A: Cathartic or therapeutic—those words are sometimes used to relate a feeling, like a sigh of relief, or release, but therapy is fucking hard. My therapists didn’t pity me, not the good ones; they made me strip myself of pandering, manipulation, presentation—they wanted the truth more desperately than I did, and then they wanted me to speak it—live it every moment. I feel like writing is that way. Writing can be hard therapy. You write, and then read it, revise your work to be cleaner, sharper, better, and then, when you have the best version of yourself (not rhetorically, but you’ve come close to playing the music you hear in your head)—you give it time and re-read it—you go back to work—it seems endless. Nothing is ever communicated fully. The way being healed is never real unless every moment of every day you remind yourself of your progress and remind yourself not to go back, or hurt someone, or do the wrong thing—it’s not healing unless you keep moving—you’re never done. The work of “never done”: therapy and writing.
Q: Within the work, you most explicitly name one influence: “Her name was Adrienne, like a poet I loved. A woman of exclusion, who loved women enough to give her work solely to them. Adrienne was part of a continuum working against erasure.” Her friendship and support of Jean Valentine, one of my mentors and teachers, brings up another literary lineage. How does this assert, in some ways, that a woman’s story is a story for “everywoman,” and what, if any particular aspect of her work, is this referencing?
A: Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck—this book is sometimes for her—everything she’s done for me.
Q: Can you talk about the necessary contrivances Native writers often have to employ to make their work accessible not just to dominant culture but also to other Native writers? Overdetermination, surfaces, any evasions? Elusiveness?
A: People want a Native identity crisis. The most digestible thing we can do is to note what it’s like being an Indian somewhere Indians aren’t supposed to be (anywhere in North America, really). We want to see that too—to some degree. I feel some type of affinity for the Indian in the sculpture, End of the Trail. I want to be that Indian, but, no. The reckoning, or futile endeavor of being Indian, there’s profundity there, but ultimately it’s false and contrived—put upon us because they want us to stay relics, and romance is beautiful, relics are beautiful—I feel pulled in and I resist.