A Not So Linear Memoir

So, a friend posted on social media what I thought was a painting of electricity in an inky-black human brain leaking out a color-blocked, sideways human profile. I thought the painting looked like depression, creativity and treatment. Ellen Forney’s graphic memoir Marbles came to mind because that memoir made me think of creatives with mental health problems who have to be on meds to cope, and what happens to their creativity as a result of being medicated. I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone, so I’ll just say I clicked on the picture and it redirected me to The Genre of Affliction, an article about creative nonfiction genres concerning some affliction, like trauma for example.

When I wrote Molding Clay Faces I had a hard time remembering the chronology of events as they unfolded, and it took me so long to decide on what format my CNF story would take. I read The Body Keeps the Score and I understood why I had only short bursts of scene coming to me like electrical sparks.

Later, I would read about how non-western cultures conceptualize time in a Native American Literature and Critical Theory class. Some say time is linear: the past is behind us, the future is ahead and we are in the middle, some say it is a circle, some say it is a woven basket intertwined within itself, meaning past present future all live together.

I love the basket analogy most because my lived experience and thought processes jump from future to past so fast I’m like a cat chasing a glowing red dot. My memories are not stacked up in the order of their occurrence, they are like a huge box full of puzzle pieces from a variety of chopped up images, and as a writer I’m sorting them to draw a big picture.

The Ovaherero people I hail from have a culture of oral poetry which is a form of non-linear story telling. In The Form and Meaning of Ovaherero Praise Poetry the scholar Jekura Kavari speaks of how an outsider would be locked out of Outjina/ or Ovaherero Praise Poetry, the outsider would have to really dwell with that community and—to use the words of a psychologist friend, “Hold Space” for the poet, and for the people telling their fragmented trauma stories.

So, I’ve been thinking of how I would write my own memoir, would I strive for a linear narrative complete with an inciting incident, rising action, climax, and all that when I do not even know when what started? I was born in medias res, and if that means I was born between the past, present and the future, why would I strive for a neat narrative?

I started typing a response to my friend’s post, and wrote: “As a reader, I appreciate a linear story…as a practicing writer, I don’t have a 15 page linear story most times. I only have related fragments, and sometimes when I put those fragments on paper it looks like a color palate, or a kind of story of about six pages. Thank goodness for flash CNF.

Writing about trauma is fragmented even in the process of creating. We don’t sit and weave neat little narratives like a medieval author writing about a perfect love story between a knight and a lady. We write what we remember, what the things we remember remind us of, how we feel now, and what fears are evoked. Which reminds me of a speaker from my youth who once said, and I’m paraphrasing, “we are often bogged down by past pains, and the future fears —in that alliteration I see all of time conceptualized in what looks like a pro-linear time statement.

In favor of decolonizing story-telling, I’ll go for a nonlinear story which puts like-terms together, and if a reader takes the time, they will see the full picture as complicated, and that there’s no easier way to tell a complicated story than to tell a complicated story. Someone in an AWP panel said “We don’t have to have it all figured out.”

What are your thoughts about story telling? Do you prefer a neat, linear narrative, or do you like nonlinear episodes?