November 18, 2012
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From Someone Else
“It made me think of my friend Partam from Afghanistan, and a story he once told me of how he and his sisters fled the country. I retold Partam’s story to Erik as best I could, but I knew even as I was telling it that it was expanding, becoming a beast of my own invention. I told the story with the fluid beauty that I remembered it, not with the broken English Partam had used. Partam said he wanted me to write his stories of Afghanistan because he never would. But every time I retold a story, it was reshaped by my experiences, perceptions, and memories. Was I telling the truth? Was my retelling less a “true story” than the original? Was the truth that I found in it different than the one Partam wanted to convey?
He, the absence, had believed that the difference between fiction and nonfiction was black and white, that memory was a machine that recorded mathematical equations. I never managed to be a machine, to capture things exactly as they had been said, and I felt like a failure. My truth was never “the truth”; it seemed as if life had no room for interpretation, for the influence of the invisible, for the ghosts and hauntings and memories that weave their way into human interactions.
When I told him stories about Mexico City, about La Merced, I wanted to capture the way I experienced the chaos, the way I was haunted by the people, and the way they wove themselves into my imagination and my life. There was no single, clean narrative to offer up. In a world that demanded perfection, that asked for machines and mathematical precision and ironed-down eyebrows and perfectly manicured nails, my voice had no place. Truth had a value, but I was sullying it with my memory, with my failure to write down every word, to record every conversation.
My need to communicate with them, to hear their stories, stemmed from an intense yearning to understand what we had in common, how the pressures to be beautiful, make money, and find love (or lust) have driven us to take unexpected measures, to compromise our values and our bodies in some way. Were we women, like the dismembered mannequins on the street, a collection of parts to be made beautiful? In order to communicate with them in an ethical way, I needed to live in La Merced, to spend years in the community, as Maya did, and to contribute to creating meaningful change. I had to ask myself: Did I think that through their stories I would rediscover my own?” http://matadornetwork.com/notebook/there-is-no-one-story-of-love-lost/
These are the things I feel every time I try to explain Brazil. She just said them better, and I thought you should read it.
