"I am writing this only because they can't." - Pg. 26
This very brief passage (some might even call it a line or sentance) seemed worthy of note to me because it reminded me of our discussion of writing preserving lives and memories beyond what actual life or actual memory can do.
Writing, although it can purge our memories of so much that we lose things, also preserves them indefinitely. You can save a life by writing about it, which is perhaps exactly what Danticat was trying to do in this work.
We assume that this sentence means that the two men she's primarily writing about have passed away (although maybe not... maybe they are just not capable of writing this story), so we guess that Danticat's recording of this story is an effort to keep the story (or stories, as may be more accurate) from being forgotten, a way to keep her family from being forgotten.
This reminds me of Nabokov's woe at having given away his memories to fiction, and it reminds us me of Douglass' effort to make others aware of the atrocities of his life and the lives of slaves in general. Does anyone write an autobiography and not try to preserve something? I doubt it. Perhaps we also write autobiographies in order to forget or leave out certain things. After the author dies, that negative incident that was left out will forever cease to exist. So life-writing is an act of preserving while it is also, simultaneously, an act of eliminating.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
((place intriguing entry title here))
in response to the prompt: write to one of your memories as though it were a person.
i remember you, rough warm pavement, that loved to stub little toes and scratch little hands, and coerced with sand so that causing little knees to bleed took much less effort than if they were working separately. i remember you like i remember the height of the basketball hoop. i was four and you were ten-thousand feet high. you pushed me while i pushed myself, a globe of pickled orange between my two palms: no bigger than baby maple leaves. up into the air, that familiar space between the ground and the sky; my outline lifted by the innocence of itself in the moment. i remember you too gravity, reeling me down again to meet the concrete warmth of the long driveway pavement lined with argus-eyed day lilies. it was then that the fabric of my knees tore, so easily, as if the worn threads of my seams had ripped. that scary bright color fell out, and small pebbles jumped in; i still have the dark spots to prove it. and i remember you fear; fear of my mother scraping the pre-scars with something antiseptic, and the pain it would cause and hiding in the red, two-story playhouse my father built within the apple trees; a quiet, self-healing, nursing of the surface where my leg bent in half. i remember you painfilled pleasant memory.
i remember you, rough warm pavement, that loved to stub little toes and scratch little hands, and coerced with sand so that causing little knees to bleed took much less effort than if they were working separately. i remember you like i remember the height of the basketball hoop. i was four and you were ten-thousand feet high. you pushed me while i pushed myself, a globe of pickled orange between my two palms: no bigger than baby maple leaves. up into the air, that familiar space between the ground and the sky; my outline lifted by the innocence of itself in the moment. i remember you too gravity, reeling me down again to meet the concrete warmth of the long driveway pavement lined with argus-eyed day lilies. it was then that the fabric of my knees tore, so easily, as if the worn threads of my seams had ripped. that scary bright color fell out, and small pebbles jumped in; i still have the dark spots to prove it. and i remember you fear; fear of my mother scraping the pre-scars with something antiseptic, and the pain it would cause and hiding in the red, two-story playhouse my father built within the apple trees; a quiet, self-healing, nursing of the surface where my leg bent in half. i remember you painfilled pleasant memory.
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