Tag: Memoir

Unanticipated Borders (Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings by Jonathan Raban)

Readers don’t have to be sailors to enjoy this travelogue through the Inside Passage where we sail and cross unanticipated borders. For those “reading as writers” I make two suggestions: First, consider how Raban weaves two distinctly different themes in one story; second: those who are writing historical stories can learn much by noting how Raban draws upon others’ experiences and interpretations and how he weaves these with his own to create a nuanced narrative.

Ostensibly, Passage to Juneau is a sailing memoir that Jonathan Raban makes from Seattle, through Canadian waters, to Juneau Alaska. Readers are taken along on a journey that follows the route of George Vancouver who captained the surveying expedition of 1791-95 for Britain and for whom Vancouver Island and the city on the mainland are named. The Passage challenges. Raban notes that “The Inside Passage to Alaska, with its outer fringes and entailments, is an extraordinarily complicated sea-route, in more ways than one.” It’s a passage he makes alone, leaving his wife and young daughter alone in Seattle. For company, he fills bookshelves on his 35-foot sailboat with history, lore and myth written by anthropologists and sailor-writers. As he prepares to leave land, he candidly writes:

I am afraid of the sea.…I’m not a natural sailor, but a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I’m at sea.

Yet for the last fifteen years, every spare day that I could tease from the calendar has been spent afloat, in a state of undiminished fascination with the sea, its movements and meanings. When other people count sheep, or reach for the Halcion bottle, I make imaginary voyages—where the sea is always lightly brushed by a wind of no more than fifteen knots, the visibility always good, and the boat never more than an hour from the nearest safe anchorage.

He sets off, hugging the coast.

This is my second Jonathan Raban travel story. A few years ago I read Arabia Through the Looking Glass and looked forward to Passage to Juneau, anticipating more of the same. Rabin takes a novelists’ approach, creating skilfully drawn characters and keen insight into people and places. He merges historical interpretations and impressions with his own insights and style, but here he’s a little more acerbic than curmudgeon.

Opening this book, I expected a sailing story, and sailing is the focus of the first half of the story, but with “The Rite of Passage” chapter, the story shifts. The mood swings to a far more personal and emotionally intense one, no longer an intellectual or an observer stance. It’s true, we set out with a plan and life intervenes. The story began as one thing and ended as another. It’s also true that in the first chapter, Raban provides a hint about the change to come:

 I had a boat, most of a spring and summer, a cargo of books, and the kind of dream of self-enrichment that spurs everyone who sails north from Seattle. Forget the herring and the salmon: I meant to go fishing for reflections, and come back with a glittering haul. Other people’s reflections, as I thought then. I wasn’t prepared for the catch I eventually made.

Despite this, I wasn’t prepared for what are essentially two distinct stories.

Jonathan Raban’s travel writing is insightful and his use of language a pleasure to read earning him many plaudits. But in someone with lesser skills, I doubt the starkness of the contrast between the themes would have worked.

For those who are “reading as writers,” Raban’s story provides a cautionary tale. Although both halves are memoir, and the story begins and ends with sailing, the two themes differ in mood, tone, and focus. The sailing memoir loses coherence; the meaning Rabin finds does not derive from the sea as suggested in the memoir’s subtitle. At times, I felt as if Raban had a contract to write about following Vancouver’s log through the Inside Passage, but then life intervened and gave him passion as opposed to an intellectual pursuit to focus upon.

There is also a lesson from what Raban does very well. Those who are writing historical stories can learn much by noting how Raban draws upon others’ experiences and interpretations and how he weaves these with his own to create a nuanced narrative.

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Available through your local bookstore or online: Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings

Mabel Means Loveable (H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald)

If you read for pleasure, enjoy H is for Hawk, a fascinating, award-winning memoir about a falconer who trains a goshawk. If you “Read as a Writer,” keep four questions in mind: 1) how the first paragraph works to set the stage for what follows; 2) how Macdonald enlarges and layers the memoir from a narrow “I” focus, and 3) how she tackles challenging issues, and 4) how she uses hawks and falconry as metaphor.

After Helen Macdonald’s father dies suddenly, she begins a downward spiral. The death of a loved one is something we all face and, although there are recognized stages to the experience, we each find our own way through the labyrinth of loss. Of grief and madness, she writes, “I knew I wasn’t mad mad…[but then] I started dreaming of hawks all the time…raptor, meaning ‘bird of prey.’ From the Latin raptor, meaning ‘robber,’ from rapere, meaning ‘seize.’” The dreams led to an obsession: “I dreamed of the hawk slipping through wet air to somewhere else. I wanted to follow it.” Macdonald turns to a goshawk, a raptor with a reputation for being the most challenging to train—even for the experienced falconer she is.

Macdonald names her hawk Mabel. “Mabel. From amabilis, meaning loveable, or dear. An old, slightly silly name, an unfashionable name.… There’s a superstition among falconers that a hawk’s ability is inversely proportional to the ferocity of its name.” She wants Mabel to be ferocious. Through Mabel, Macdonald becomes goshawk, becomes wild. The goshawk becomes a metaphor, a spiritual guide.

During the training, she turns to all she’s learned from childhood stories, to her experience as a falconer and to falconer friends, as well as to T.H. White’s The Goshawk and The Sword in the Stone.  Of The Goshawk, she says that “White made falconry a metaphysical battle [like] Moby-Dick or The Old Man and the Sea….” Macdonald says of herself and White’s The Sword in the Stone:

“I was turning into a hawk.

I didn’t shrink and grow plumes like the Wart in The Sword in the Stone, who was transformed by Merlyn into a merlin as part of his magical education. I had loved the scene as a child. I had read it over and over again, thrilling at the Wart’s toes turning to talons and scratching on the floor, his primary feathers bursting in soft blue quills from the tips of his fingers. But I was turning into a hawk all the same.

Macdonald weaves White’s biography into her memoir. For more than a few pages, H is for Hawk, seems more White than Macdonald, but always relevant to her state of mind and passage through bereavement.

She also reflects on a 13th century poem called Sir Orfeo, “a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and the underworld by way of traditional Celtic songs about the otherworld, the Land of Faery. In Celtic myth that otherworld is not deep underground; it is just one step aside from our own.” She links this with the…

Ability of hawks to cross borders that humans cannot is a thing far older than Celtic myth, older than Orpheus—for in ancient shamanic traditions right across Eurasia, hawks and falcons were seen as messengers between this world and the next.

Macdonald constantly probes literature and raptor lore, seeking understanding while revealing truths she only half realizes at the time of her “not mad mad” period. For nature lovers, she takes us into fields near the edge of woods in weather that only a diehard falconer would venture. She also debates the moral issue of keeping a hawk whose purpose is death.

We witness the deterioration of her physical and mental life after her father’s death and her escape into wildness. Through memories and Macdonald’s reflections on falconry literature and practice, we come to see how she copes with loss and also how she grows and changes.

If you are a writer, important lessons can be gleaned by reading H is for Hawk. In addition to enjoying a fascinating story…

  1. Look closely at the all-important first paragraph, noticing how Macdonald provides a setting, the first-person narrative, the idea of a journey, and her purpose which is to see goshawks. See how relevant this is to what follows.
  2. Think about how she weaves her story into T.H. White’s biography, and more generally, how she uses literature and lore to enlarge the narrative, lifting it above a potentially maudlin or nostalgic ramble.
  3. Nature writers might want to think about how she handles issues of wild and morality, and
  4. Think about the role metaphor plays throughout the story.

H is for Hawk is a winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, and it was the COSTA Book of the Year 2014. It’s a good read. Enjoy.

H is for Hawk.jpg

Available through your local bookstore or online: H is for Hawk

Seeking Libya (The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar)

“Pain shrinks the heart. This, I believe, is part of the intention. You make a man disappear to silence him but also to narrow the minds of those left behind, to pervert their soul and limit their imagination.”

In The Return, Hisham Matar provides two stories: the story of Libya and the story of a dissidents’ disappearance and the family left behind. We gain more than a glimpse into Libya’s history – from its little know past and vague borders through the Italian-colonial period, revolts and coups, to political intrigue involving Egypt and Britain, to cultural insights into the Bedoin and a family saga, the impact of exile (“Guilt is exile’s eternal companion.”) and especially the struggle of a man to find his father.

Hisham Matar is a young man studying in London when his father disappears from the family’s exile in Egypt. At the time, Libya has been taken over by Gaddafi. Much of the first part of the book looks back at the history of both the country and the family. Of his father, he writes that “he was a writer responding to ghosts and to history.” As the story progresses, Matar questions official stories and contemplates what happens to those left after the disappearances of dissidents: the dearth of creativity, the shrivelling of the soul.

Through the passing years, Matar waffles emotionally, often succumbing to the likeliness that his father is dead. “But then hope, cunning and persistent, crept back in… .” We ride emotional storms and political frustrations as the search moves from a personal one to an international one. Slowly, over decades, facts leak out, and eventually there is a regime change. The son makes a visit to the now-empty prison.

Abu Salim is the last place Jaballa Matar was known to be alive. It’s the site of the massacre of 1,270 prisoners, “the incident that all those years ago had started a chain of events that ultimately led to the overthrow of Gaddafi.” He visits the prison but fails to find closure: “The body of my father is gone, but his place is here and occupied by something that cannot just be called memory.” And later: “My father is both dead and alive… . I live, as we all live, in the aftermath.”

Matar’s writing and research skills are clear throughout The Return (as they are in his novel In the Country of Men that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.) The memoir attempts a balancing act. However, I frequently found that he succumbs to an emotionally flat tone, and I wonder if it is a way to maintain a distance from the pain of loss and of grief forever raw and unresolved. But this is a small complaint given the scope of the story, its range across time, generations, the personal and the political.

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Available through your local bookstore or online: The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

Bus & Mind Travels (Oaxaca Journal 2002 and The River of Consciousness 2017 by Oliver Sacks)

“[W]e deceive ourselves if we imagine that we can ever be passive, impartial observers. Every perception, every scene, is shaped by us, whether we intend it or know it, or not. We are the directors of the film we are making – but we are its subjects too: every frame, every moment, is us, is ours.”

Oaxaca Journal documents physical travel, a trip taken, a journal kept. The River of Consicousness time travels across ideas that are wide-ranging and far-reaching toward an understanding of systems both physical and of the mind. A truly renaissance man, Sacks seems always to be looking simultaneously at details and the big picture of our understanding and of what makes us human, a holistic approach to physical science, neuroscience, creativity, and consciousness.

Oaxaca Journal:

Many of you will know Dr. Oliver Sacks from his book, Awakenings, or the movie starring Robert de Niro and Robin Williams. He was a prolific writer, often writing out of his observations and experiences from his medical practice, but not always.

The first book by Sacks’ that I read, Oaxaca Journal, is an adventure story, detailing his travels with the American Fern Society. The trip was “an introduction to a people, a country, a culture, a history, of which [he] knew almost nothing – this was wonderful, an adventure in itself… .” Sacks was a serious amateur biologist, an enthusiastic traveller, and also a lifelong journal-keeper. He had a keen eye for detail, was exceptionally curious, and he had an ability to weave a tale that keeps readers turning pages. He was anything but “a passive, impartial, observer.” For example, on this trip, he skips a bus tour to sit in the plaza, sees and analyses:

Tourists, pale-faced, awkward, uncouthly dressed, instantly stand out from the graceful indigenes… .
Writing, like this, at a café table, in a sweet outdoor square…this is la dolce vita. It evokes images of Hemingway and Joyce, expatriate writers at tables in Havana and Paris… . I love to write in an open sunny place, the windows admitting every sight and sound and smell of the outside world. I like to write at café tables, where I can see (though at a distance) society before me.

Oaxaca takes us on treacherous bus rides, roadside stops to examine ferns, inside a chocolate factory, and into plazas where children call “Peso, peso… .” We discover with him.

 

The River of Consciousness

We are also with him as he travels across eras – from Darwin’s ideas about evolution and his garden experiments in biology to the philosophy of the ancients right up to modern science and neuroscience on systems of the body and the mind.

Sacks is a weaver who could create a tapestry from disparate sciences and make sense of them, not just for scientists. One of my favourite chapters in the book is called “The Creative Self,” in which he explores play, mimicry, and imitation. “All of us,” he writes, “to some extent, borrow from others, from the culture around us. Ideas are in the air, and we may appropriate, often without realizing, the phrases and language of the times. We borrow language itself; we did not invent it.” And he also writes of the importance of incubation, “the hugely complex problems performed by an entire hidden, creative self,” often that come to us in the moments just before or just after sleep. And he says of creativity:

…that state when ideas seem to organize themselves into a swift, tightly woven flow, with a feeling of gorgeous clarity and meaning emerging – seems to me physiologically distinctive, and I think that if we had the ability to make fine enough brain images, these would show an unusual and widespread activity with innumerable connections and synchronizations occurring.

This, I suspect, is what the whole book might be about: the “innumerable connections an synchronizations” that occur across disciplines – arts and sciences.

For creative connections, playful curiosity, and a world of original ideas, one of Oliver Sacks’ fourteen books might be exactly where to turn. Oaxaca and The River of Consciousness provide just a glimpse.

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Available through your local bookstore or online: Oaxaca Journal and River of Consciousness

Wanderlust (Birds Art Life by Kyo Maclear)

“Day after day we are brave in our persistence”.

Wanderlust can occur at the most inopportune times.

When Kyo Maclear’s responsibilities make demands that keep her near home – her dad’s failing health, the experience of raising two young sons, and other of life’s challenges – she finds a unique way to address a kind of solitude that stymies her creativity.

She happens across a bit of film featuring a musician who has struggled and been lost. Summarizing the clip, she writes:

After years of wallowing in creative depression, he had quit drinking and found peace by birding in the inner city. “I didn’t even have to think about it. I just felt easier. I felt easy-hearted,” he said.

He had discovered his joy was bird-shaped.

….

“I made contact with the musician and arranged to meet him for a bird walk. I wanted to feel enraptured and inspirable.”

And so, a year’s traipsing begins. Slowly, she enters the world of birds, an observer, a thinker. On one of their jaunts, Maclear “follows the musician along the boardwalk to a wooded area of the lake.” She struggles…

to become one with the rock. And then, just like that, [she] settled in. The minutes and hours passed. A trumpeter swan retracted its neck and made a funny trumpet sound. Three tundra swans paddled up and down the shoreline, a reflection of my own inner drift.

She explores within the city’s confines, learning its nooks and crannies, its parks and waterways. Maclear often finds the outings challenging but also deeply rewarding. The musician does not lead her far geographically, but through their birding, she comes to understand some things beyond time and space. The excursions are as much inner journeys for Maclear as they are external, and she begins to find creative ways to express what had been lost to her.

On its surface, this is a small book in which little happens. We are nowhere and everywhere. But volumes happen within a prose that verges on poetry. Maclear’s awarenesses quietly stack upon one another. And this growing insight is sprinkled with bird and other stray facts that add substance for trivia aficionados. One such time, she ponders the name of her city:

As night fell, we stood together at the edge of a city named after the Mohawk word tkaronto meaning “where there are trees standing in water.” I tried to picture the area covered in aspen and poplar forests. Then I went back further and pictured the former shoreline as it would have existed 12,500 years ago, well to the north of where we now stood. I pictured us submerged in glacial lake water.

Throughout the year of bird-watching, Maclear searches to make sense of life in this world. And she becomes fascinated not only with the birds themselves but with the path they led her down. Maclear’s peregrine falcons also nudged a sleeping memory within me.

A few years ago, a peregrine built her nest directly outside my back door on a deck under construction. I couldn’t imagine a more inappropriate site with my constant coming and going. Nonetheless, the peregrines managed, and it was an amazing experience for me to watch the eggs hatch and to witness the dutiful feeding and, eventually, the fledglings’ evacuation.

The peregrines also nudge a memory for Maclear and she goes on a small search:

…I found the navy blue Oxford dictionary [my father] had given me for my seventh birthday. I confirmed the word peregrine means “having a tendency to wander.”

It clearly fit the peregrine falcon, which is known to travel vast distances, but maybe it also fit me and this book I was writing about being a little lost, this book of inward and outward travelling to the verge of life.

Birds Art Life lives up to its title. It is a lyrical and philosophical exploration of nature, love, and anticipated loss with lots and lots of life.

It’s amazing how much travelling can be done within a city’s limits (or your armchair).

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Available through your local bookstore or online: Birds Art Life

Journeys: a Writer’s (incomplete) Oeuvre (Prose: One Room in a Castle 1995; The Lizard Cage 2005; Burmese Lessons 2009; The Change Room 2017. Poetry: The Border Surrounds Us 2000; and Grace & Poison 1990 by Karen Connelly)

I know this. Our lives begin and end with journeys made alone.
“The Lid Over Europe” (100-101), One Room in a Castle

Karen Connelly makes many journeys. Travel introduces us to strangers and both her poems and prose reveal ways of understanding the other and experiencing ourselves.

In her 2017 novel, The Change Room, she notes two paths toward knowing: listening and storytelling. “Listening,” she writes, “was a way of pulling a stranger toward you without touching.” And so is storytelling: Shar or Shaharzad or Sheherazade – the great storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights – is the siren of enticement in The Change Room and the sensual “amazon” of the story. Listening and storytelling, strangers and borders, are common themes in Connelly’s oeuvre.

Writers’ recurrent themes interest me. I like their unfolding like fans, and their closing tight. I like the way they spread across continents and genres – always surprising, maturing, shifting but remaining, in important ways, the same. In Karen Connelly’s writing, the travellers and lovers among us glimpse ways of knowing ourselves and the other. This holds true from her earliest stories to the most recent novel.

In Connelly’s stories, strangers often become intimate in a variety of ways, sensuality being one. In “Esmeralda, a story” (One Room in a Castle 36-67), readers glimpse insights into what has matured into the novel The Change Room.

From Castle: “Our greatest similarity was our love of water, the freedom of motion it creates. ‘It’s flying,’ Esmé said. ‘It’s the closest we’ll come to being free of our bodies.’ We began to meet in the change-room before swimming….” Esmé swims; she is also a musician. Music, like water, is freeing and sensuous: “She closed her eyes, bent herself over the piano, and laid her hands on its black surface…. Then I leaned forward and kissed her eyelids.” These themes sown in Castle dominate in Room.

In The Change Room, the writing is more complex, layered and mature, but in the early work, we glimpsed seeds that later became mature fruit. (For more on recurring themes of individual writers, please also see my review of Bicycle Thieves by Mary di Michele.)

Connelly writes across genres, which leads me to think about truth in nonfiction and fiction. One Room in a Castle, for example, was published as nonfiction – purportedly as correspondence and travel. The Change Room – 22 years later — as fiction. It begins with an Emily Dickinson quote:

“Ourself, behind ourself, concealed,
should startle most.”

And we are left wondering about the difference between reality and imagination – a conundrum for writers and readers. Connelly does provide hints. For example, in “Extrah-dinary” (Castle 33-35) she writes “It is difficult to get to the truth of one’s self; how much more difficult to create an imaginary world and reveal its truth.” Still…. (For more on this topic of fact and truth, please see my review of Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel.)

I was introduced to Connelly’s writing through a book club reading of her mid-1990s memoir, Burmese Lessons, which still pops into consciousness despite the time lapse. But it’s the poetry collection, The Border Surrounds Us, which remains my favourite – especially section II – which I’ve read over-and-over again.  It is only recently that I discovered Grace & Poison, a compilation of Connelly’s first two poetry books. Even in 1990 her themes were clear and her voice strong. From that collection, a prose poem – “A Story for Suradev, In Bangkok” – stands out. In it we find her mature themes of intimacy/compassion, strangers/self. The closeness of her observations stand stark.

Her passion for travel and imagining the experiences of those she meets into story is continuous. Perhaps Connelly’s most intense book is The Lizard Cage, published in 2005, which drew me back to Burmese Lessons. Burmese Lessons is essentially a love story/a political story. The Lizard Cage is darker, taking readers inside a Burmese prison and into the isolation of an ancient man and a small boy, cruelty beyond comprehension, love, and survival. Somehow Connelly manages to maintain dignity, love, compassion, and beauty.

Karen Connelly began her writing career with the idea of borders, journeys from the known into the unknown: “Our lives begin and end with journeys made alone,” she wrote in her early twenties. In between life’s bookends, many other journeys are made and borders crossed: some geographic and cultural; some social and political; most intimate and sensual. They are all crossed personally, alone, and usually with risk of one sort or another. The intimacy with which she crosses borders can challenge us; she touches the heart, the soul, and the body.

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Various publishers have put Karen Connelly’s writing into print. Search her name or the name of one of her books and that will take you to a source. Most are available through your local bookstore or online.

A Young Life: without sentimentality or cynicism (Notes from the Hyena’s Belly by Nega Mezlekia)

“I was born in the year of the paradox, in the labyrinthine city of Jijiga. After a three-year absence, the rains had come, swelling the rivers and streams. The clay desert, as dry as the skin of a drum, became green once more. Queen Menen, wife of King Haile Selassie, lay dying. She was as reluctant to leave this world as I was to leave the womb.”

Nega Mezlekia tells a tale that spell-binds, and he does it with dark humour – an extraordinary feat for the story of Ethiopia’s coup and counter-coup history. The first paragraph sets a tone Mezlekia maintains. In Notes from the Hyena’s Belly we journey into a child’s world of paradox, a world in which innocence and awareness, love and cruelty co-mingle. We glimpse the roots that nourish a precocious, curious and stubbornly confident boy as well as the socio-economic-political reality of Ethiopia – accomplished with lightness (even through life-threatening situations). Mezlekia shows us how deep this complex duality runs: “In Ethiopia,” he writes, “poetry is second only to the achievements of kings. Poets are sought after and treated with great reverence by the ruling class. …The most popular form of poetry, known as the kinae, offers one message to the untrained ear and another to cultured listeners.” Notes carries on the tradition.

Mezlekia is a skilled, insightful poetic writer, one who has mastered nuance and the twist that both informs and surprises. His language and rhythm, his lack of sentimentality and cynicism carry us through Ethiopia’s sad history as we keep turning pages. Mezlekia provides insight into his journey from boyhood shenanigans into manhood within a revolutionary and war-torn context. He has written a powerful story of lost innocence and of survival.

Notes from the Hyena’s Belly goes beyond the personal story; it offers insight into what it is to be human, a connection and an awakening for each reader. On the one hand, this biography is specific to Mezlekia, but it also tells a story that is far too common across the post-colonial African continent and, I’m afraid, even beyond. We can draw parallels to what is happening in the world today.

Given the skilful writing and master storytelling, it is little wonder that Notes from the Hyena’s Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood won Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s award for literature (2000). (It was published in the U.S. simply as Notes from the Hyena’s Belly.) Highly recommended.

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Available through your local bookstore or online: Notes From the Hyena’s Belly