One of my advisors a year ago encouraged me to write a memoir based on a writing prompt during one of our residency workshops. He was so enthralled by what I had written within the ten minutes given, he promptly shared his excitement with my previous advisor, who accosted me at our next workshop.
I have never thought about writing a memoir. Who the hell am I? I never imagined I had anything interesting to share. The writing prompt was meant to draw out a past memory, nothing more. But when he insisted that I consider the memoir after what I wrote, I began to toy with the idea.
Some of you have read the very short opening of my piece. The overall piece is now nearly 100 pages. For both those who have read the opening and those who have not, I’d be interested to know if you read what I’ve shared below (what I wrote during the workshop), would you be curious and want to read more?
Be honest. I have thick skin.
I was born beneath Cuba, across the waters of the West Indies on an island that lives and breathes Bob Marley. It was 1967. While papa, my grandfather, was mending the house he built with his bare hands, civil rights marches were happening in “foreign” the place the locals called America. As King, Jr. lay dead, murdered by the mindset of the majority, I learned to walk on hot stones. The light of a man went out. I was oblivious to this then. I lived in a place where electricity and running water and indoor plumbing didn’t reach us. The outhouse was dark at night. But my uncle would take me there sometimes. At other times the chimmy, as my grandmother called it, would be pulled out from under the bed, squatted over, then slid back filled with yellow waste that reminded us of our simple life.
I was small and grass blade thin but I remember the mangoes and jackfruit and star apples and ackee and ginepes and the flowers I used to make jewelry, little necklaces and bracelets, bright and red and beautiful. I want to remember the name of that flower, but time sends memories away to places we can’t find.
More please. You have a way with words that hooks the reader in and makes one hungry for the next experience.
The truth of the sentence, “but time sends memories away to places we can’t find” appeals to me in that as I get older and approach my sixth decade of life memories slip out of time into space a space colored by adult perception that sometimes clouds the child mind or bring vibrant revelation to the senior adult.
“clouds the child mind…” Yes. I feel that deeply. We’ve all been tainted unaware.
So many of us will never realize how the child mind could be what brings the planet peace, if only we would return to that purity.
I say keep writing!
Reading this reminds me of tin roofs playing nature’s song as I watched the sun from my grandmother’s porch. By most accounts, it was hard living. By our accounts, it was so much more than creature comforts could ever afford. Thank you for this.