There are many ways to write a life

I haven’t posted in ages.  The past year I’ve been plain too busy to write.  Too much life, not enough writing.  Which brings me to my topic:

There are many ways to write a life. 

Call me a narcissist, but I think that academic lives can be  particularly interesting, and I often enjoy reading academic memoirs.  Cynthia Franklin thinks so too.  She recently wrote a hefty study of the genre:  Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today   (University of Georgia Press, 2009).  Why, she asks, do so many professors choose to write memoirs, and why do memoirs provide such cultural capital?

Contrary to what you might think, she argues that memoir writing is not about creating academic stars but quite the reverse; that memoirs “emerge from academic struggles with the tenuousness of their status in the public sphere and that more generally of the university.”  The book features chapters on well-known scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Edward Said and Jane Gallup, as well as a host of the less known. It’s a significant, intelligent book.   But there’s something in the analysis of the memoir that is less compelling than the genre itself; maybe the same thing people say about serious analyses of comedy. 

John S. Saul, the Canadian scholar of Southern Africa, has come up with another take on the academic memoir.  In Revolutionary Traveler: Freeze Frames From a Life   (Arbeiter Ring, 2009) Saul revisits some of his vast writings on the politics of Southern Africa, prefacing articles and excerpts of papers with insightful and often quite fascinating accounts of where he was teaching, or what the politics of the moment were when he was writing each piece.

 For someone who traversed the Canadian anti apartheid movement, taught in newly decolonized Tanzania and Mozambique, not to mention spending lots of time in South Africa itself during the tumultuous decades since the 1960s, Saul’s personal reflections are riveting.  It’s an interesting idea, revisiting one’s own writing in order to connect it to the broader narrative and circumstances of life and politics.  This too is a significant, and really quite fascinating book. But while I like the twist on the genre, I also was curious about the personal, self-reflective side of the story.  The best memoirs witness and grapple with oneself in the times.  No one has done this better than the U.S. feminist writer and teacher Margaret Randall.  Her recent To Change The World: My Years in Cuba (Rutgers University Press, 2009) is sublime.  It helps that she’s a poet, as every word of the book is chosen and polished.  But really, Randall lived the 1960s and 1970s in Havana (getting out before it all began to fall apart) and then hung around Nicaragua in the post Sandinista 1980s.  She had multiple husbands, lots of children, and seemed to be friends with every scholar, poet, revolutionary and musician in Latin America.  Her memoir, which is often personally and politically painful,  prompted me to think something I have never thought before:  I wish I’d lived her life. 

Cuba was a fascinating place in the 1960s but is sure is a difficult place to be these days, and three Cuban friends have recently made their way to my town, to give life in Canada a try.  They’ve been staying at my house for a few weeks while they are waiting to move into their new apartment.  Their presence gives me a close-up education about the lives of immigrants.  One of them, a thirteen year old, is coping with the pain of loneliness and separation as best he can: he’s staying up until three o’clock in the morning writing stories of his life.  His mother, coping with her own pain, loss, confusion, economic and other uncertainties, is staying awake beside him, so that she can read the words he writes.  This has inspired my own ten year old, who copes with another kind of pain, reading and writing disabilities, to start his own ‘life story’, to which he adds a little bit every night.  I fear running out of baby stories for him to include, but every night he finds something new to say.  

There are many ways to write a life, and really, we should never be so busy as to forget that.