Whose Story is it Anyway?

On Colonizing Stories

In his beautiful essay The Strawberry Lottery

Sherman Alexie

writes about watching a young man carefully selecting strawberries in a supermarket:

You might be wondering how much time I spent watching that young man. I can’t put a clock on it. I’m a writer so I automatically pay more attention to the words and actions of strangers than I probably should. That’s why I always laugh when writers claim they are “decolonizing” storytelling. Who are they kidding? Writers are the most persistent and ubiquitous colonizers of all. We appropriate other people’s experiences. We appropriate conversations that we’ve eavesdropped. We turn real people into clay figures that we manipulate. And any of you who are friends and family (and enemies) of writers know how much we mine your life for the good stuff. Writers plunder natural resources.

This passage made me laugh out loud, but was also an uncomfortable recognition of something that we writers do, but reluctant to admit openly. Yes, we watch, we eavesdrop, we appropriate and manipulate other people’s experiences to mine for good stuff. In the case of the strawberry selecting young man that Sherman Alexie describes in his essay, there is no harm done. The strawberry selecting young man is not likely to ever read Alexie’s essay and protest about the writer’s presentation (colonisation) of him, nor anyone is likely to point at him in the street and whisper, “there goes that strawberry selecting young man from Sherman Alexie’s story.”

But what do you do when your story collides with someone close to you: a family member, a partner, or a lover? Sherman Alexie humorously proposes the following question:

I don’t know why anybody gets romantically involved with a writer. O, damn, O, damn, the intimacies that we parade around the town square!

I agree (again) with Alexie. So much so, that I promised myself that the next time I find myself on a coffee date, I’ll be sure to warn the oblivious victim that anything he says or does might be used against him in the court of literature.

Part 1: Colonizing Lovers

Two years ago, I wrote a 65,000 word long account on my brief affair with a Brazilian man who had broken my heart. When I sat down to write, I didn’t know that it was going to be a 65,000 word long story, or that I was going to ‘produce’ anything creative. I didn’t sit down with the intention to write “good stuff;” I sat down to write because I was so miserable that for a brief moment, I was contemplating jumping out the window, and I wanted to make myself happy again.

I remember the immediate sense of relief with the first word I typed. I was no longer the jilted lover, but the omnipotent writer who could shape the story any way she liked. The experience was so healing – and strangely, joyful – that I kept writing for two months without once hitting a writing block. At the other end of the 65,000 words, I emerged not only free from my heartache, but having learned some invaluable lessons on my own (not-so-healthy) patterns of loving.

I had also produced an unusual piece of creative work, unlike anything I had written. What was I supposed to do with those 65,000 words now? I decided to put some distance between me and the manuscript and re-read it again, with what I hoped would be a more objective eye.

When I revisited the same raw draft months later, what struck me the most was my generosity as a writer. Even from that aching place, I sought to understand, not to disparage the man who had hurt me so profoundly. It was a love story, not a revenge story, and my writing was clearly motivated by love, not hate. What I sought to understand was not why he had betrayed me (that is his story), but why I had cared for him so much in the first place.

I was surprised, and encouraged by this realization. Despite the pain, I was still capable of so much love. The Brazilian man had not taken that away from me. Something that my friend Liam said to me on our phone call immediately after the breakup, “you have done nothing wrong,” I was able to appreciate only after I had written those 65,000 words. It was true, I didn’t regret anything. Not even what I once thought was my “stupidity” for falling for him.

When I eventually decided that this story was something that captured the zeitgeist of modern day on-line dating, and perhaps even merit publishing, I took great care in protecting the identity of the man I portrayed (colonized). He was not my enemy, but a person I once loved, and I wanted to honour that, and him.

And yet, even in this more intimate scenario the risk of hurting the image of the real-life-human-version of my artistically-moulded-clay-matter are negligible. I am no longer in touch with this Brazilian man and we have no friends in common.

Part 2: The Subjective ‘Truth’

But what do you do when your personal story involves an unfavourable portrayal of a close family member who can be traced back to you, no matter how hard you try to cover the tracks? What do you do, when that story has shaped you into who you are today, and THE story, upon which all other stories are built?

In her humorous and life-affirming Ted Talk 12 truths I learned from life and writing, writer Anne Lamott says,

Remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours, and you get to tell it. If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.

The audience laughs. But I wonder if they’d be laughing still if the not-so-warm writing was about them.

Above my writing desk there is a famous quote by Katherine Mansfield that I refer to every time I feel my courage to write dwindle:

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.

But even the ‘truth’ can be subjective. What if your truth threatens to undermine someone else’s truth, with which they had protected themselves from facing an uncomfortable truth that was too painful to confront?

Part 3: Colonizing Family Members

Writer Karl Ove Knausgård managed to turn his whole family against himself when he wrote six volumes of autobiographical novels, controversially titled Min Kamp. I was deeply moved by book 1, in which I saw no villains, only hurt people who acted out their traumas and drank themselves to death rather than face their own demons. But I can understand how if you are a participant in the drama, you may be less thrilled to read about yourself sitting by the kitchen table in a pool of your own piss.

Although I am a story-teller today, once upon a time, my story too was colonized. I still remember how uncomfortable my nine-year-old self felt when my classmates flocked towards me one morning at school, waving a newspaper article in my face. I quickly recognized the picture in which my seven-year-old brother and I were seen smiling next my mother, but I was surprised by the article underneath it which described my mother’s heroic plight to escape communist Hungary and my anti-sematic father. But I was only a supporting character in my mother’s story, therefore I was never asked, nor could protest.

Part 4: The Torture of Staying Silent vs The Punishment of Speaking Out

The Min Kamp books launched Knausgård’s international career and made him one of the most revered writers of our time. I wonder, what would have happened had he not written these books? I don’t refer to the international fame and glory, although these clearly have their perks, but to his internal peace. Would he have been able to live with himself knowing that he forsook his truth for the sake of another truth; that he repressed his need to write the story out of fear of “what people may say”?

This is one of the most common dilemmas writers face. How many times have I heard a writer say, “I could never write this story until my parents die” and be tortured by their decision to stay silent?

But why the torture, you may ask. What’s the big deal? I think writer

Elif Shafak

answers this beautifully:

We are made of stories. Each and every one of us. Not to be able to tell your own story, to be silenced and shut out, therefore, is to be dehumanised.

I know this feeling intimately. The deep-rooted need to speak your inner truth, to assert yourself, that continues to fight with the self-censoring voice in your head that reminds you that being loyal to your truth might come at the cost of hurting someone you love.

Part 5: Authenticity, or Attachment?

When that someone is a parent, this schism can be particularly agonizing. Even when you are a forty something year-old independent adult, the little girl in you is forever yearning for your parent’s unconditional love and support. This is all the truer if you had never felt secure in that unconditional love; if you lived your childhood under the threat that the limited love you’d been given, and relied on for your survival, could be taken away from you in the blink of an eye if you “misbehaved” in any way.

Dr. Gábor Maté calls this a conflict between our need for attachment and a need for authenticity, in which attachment often wins. In his book The Myth of Normal, Maté explains how most people will abandon their true selves to please others and keep the relationship, even if this relationship is not particularly healthy, and at times, even destructive.

But here is another undeniable truth: you cannot please everybody.

So, I ask myself, must we wait for our parents to die to become our true, authentic selves? It sounds so absurd when you write it out, but for many people this is a lived reality. And even as they continue to “behave,” they find themselves forever lacking, silently pleading with their absent parent, “Please mummy and daddy, why don’t you just love and accept me the way that I am?”

***

I have already written 1,750 words and if you are still reading (I’m impressed!), you might get the sense that I haven’t arrived at any concrete conclusions. I have been battling with this question, and myself, ever since the beginning of the holidays when I wrote a (too?) candid piece about my journey with religion and unintentionally hurt someone I love. Was it worth it? It wasn’t a piece for The New Yorker and nobody pushed me to write it. I was caught in the festive spirit of the holidays and wanted to write a hopeful piece about what brings us together in a divided world. It was meant as a light and merry piece, but once I sat down to write it, something deeper and more honest asked to come through me. As it was written in the spirit of love, it didn’t occur to me that it could have the opposite result of my intention. In asserting my role as the ‘hero’ of that story, I carelessly colonized the story of my supporting characters (who were not just clay matter, but very much real), and overlooked an important detail that my friend pointed out to me later: while I may have completed my journey towards acceptance and liberation, the supporting characters in my story may have not arrived at the same neat conclusions. It was naïve of me to assume that they had.

Part 6: What Would People Say?

As I expressed my regret over this faux pas to a friend over tea last night, she reminded me of another truth. “But Imola, there is no easy way to tell a difficult story,” she said. “If nobody dared to talk about the horrors of the Holocaust, we wouldn’t know about it, and learn from it.” She proceeded to tell me how she regretted not knowing her grandfather’s story that died with him; how she has, to this day, “many holes” in her own family story that she wishes she could fill. How she was silenced every time she had dared to ask questions. “One day,” she was told. “One day when you are mature enough to understand.” But somehow, she was never mature enough to be able to handle the story. Not at ten, not at twenty, and not now, at thirty.

We are the children of the generation that loves to sweep things under the carpet because, “what would people say?” And what complete strangers might say is always more important than how you want to live your life, as close to that ‘truth’ that only you can determine for yourself.

Part 7: Why Does it Matter, if it Changes Nothing?

But, “Why does it matter?” Ma ze meshane, replied my mother casually in a Trieste pizzeria, when my brother had asked her a question that had haunted our childhood. This phrase in Hebrew is telling, as it could also be interpreted as, “what does it change”?

Knowledge about the past cannot change the past, that much is true. But what it can do is help illuminate the past, and provide a window into another perspective, beyond our limited, lived experience. What stories can do, and I’d argue, quite powerfully, is to illicit understanding and empathy – something our world sorely needs right now.  

There is no easy way to tell a story, but we need stories. It is through sharing our stories that we connect in the most profound ways. Take the example of my grandmother. The only time my bed-ridden ninety-one-year-old grandma can forget about her excruciating physical pain is when she is busy telling me her stories. Her stories are stories of struggle, love, and deep regret; stories I have heard many times before, but I listen to them every time with renewed interest and curiosity. I am honoured to be the keeper of her stories, and cherish them deeply.

Part 8: Writers as Colonizers, or Radical Truth-Tellers?

So yes, writers are the most persistent and ubiquitous colonizers, but they are also the bravest and most radical truth tellers.

As I continue to struggle to find the right balance between telling, and not telling a story, I like to keep checking in with myself: Why am I writing this story? Why does this story need to exist? And forgive me for the grandiose question: would the world would be a slightly better place with this story in it? Can this story be a force of good and help someone, or would result in harming someone? Do I write this story from a place of love, or a righteous need to prove a point?

None of these questions are comfortable, and the answers are not always clear. Sometimes I get it right, and sometimes I get it very wrong.

---

Post Script (2538 words later…): Again, I sat down to tackle a writing question, and I ended up investigating deeper life questions. This is what happens with writing: the journey always takes you to unexpected places. My deep gratitude if you have made it to the end…

Love and light,

Imola