Memoir: It's MY story, right? (Part 2)
Reflecting on who owns a story, who gets to tell it, and for whom.
During my recent 6-month mentorship with Ayelet Tsabari, she began her book tour for Songs for the Brokenhearted. I followed along on her journey online as she travelled around Canada and the US, reading at launch events and signing her books, and it got me imagining some distant future when maybe that might be me doing something similar.
This future also included, the very real fact of—and perhaps the scariest part of writing a book—having others read it!
It’s strange to think that something so inherent to writing a book—its readership—might be what precludes many memoirists from ever finishing the work, or at least ever publishing it. The fear of retribution and the consequence of telling your own truth, for many may outweigh the benefit of sharing one’s own lived experience. We have to be prepared to defend it.
Truth before reconciliation
Many times throughout the process, as the ideal reader shifted in my mind and my motivations for writing this memoir changed, I became almost paralyzed to the point of not wishing to continue. So much of my book has required me to gather “the data” of the places, histories, and peoples of my homeland, which includes conflicting stories, to unearth what and how it contributed to my own identity and story. But I am neither a political scientist nor a historian. Can I do all those stories justice?
There are so many contradictions, which mirror the same conflicts and violence that have manifested throughout the Balkans in my lifetime (and before). There is no way to explain the Yugoslav war “correctly”—but most of all because if there were a correct way to explain it, we wouldn’t continue to have the troubles we do, in the Balkans and in so all the many other places in the world that continue to be riddled with division and hate.
Yet, if we are to ever reconcile our shared past, we must find a common truth.
This is why I think writing memoir is such a powerful thing—and a thing of great responsibility. It is a genuine trying to get at a truth: our own truth, which is limited, but also infinitely important because it’s the closest any of us will ever get to something truly true. Everything else is a distortion of what happened, refracted through bias and egos and pride.
We must look to the stories of individuals, those written with compassion, self-awareness and in service of the world, not in service of collective propaganda or personal agendas.
I cannot ignore the facts of WWII for example, in which my Serb grandparents fought on the side of Tito’s Partisans against Nazis and their Croatian Ustaša sympathizers. I cannot ignore the atrocities of the Holocaust, where my great uncle was one of the 6 million who perished in a death camp. I also cannot ignore the bloodshed of the Yugoslav war, which happened on all sides, including unequivocally at the hands Serbs. But I also do not want to make the honouring of those histories a remembering done in vain, a remembering that brings us back to the same place we have always been and seem to return to.
My aim as a memoirist is not to keep telling the same stories, ones that continue to move us along the same narrative lines toward hate and violence (a place where ex-Yugoslavs today still justify the killing done by their own side, a place where 442 days later, Palestinians are still being murdered in Gaza as the Israeli government, like Hamas, justify their own violent acts).
My story is about my experience alone, but it also our story.
I think it important that we honour the old stories that have been carried forward through generations (and to recognize the pain and trauma of those who suffered and continue to suffer), but we also must find ways to tell these stories anew, in new contexts and with new narrative eyes—and with a wider, more loving consciousness.
I want my memoir to be added to the likes of stories that look to find the universal truths that give us reason to hope and have faith in our humanity. As a writer of memoir, I recognize that I carry a narrative lineage, but it is my responsibility to find a way to carry it forward for the good of us all.
To be continued…