I discovered Hisham Matar by chance, on the New Yorker's podcast. I started listening idly, thinking that he was a writer my mother would have liked - she liked memoir, and tales of faraway places, especially the Middle East. I had to catch my breath when he described writing about his kidnapped father: "the challenge is trying to retain the person, and not have this event abstract them." I read this as how the hard part is keeping the person whole, or, in my case, as alive as possible. The challenge is to represent my mother as I knew her in a way that is recognizable to the others who knew her, and that is as authentic to her as I can make it.
Authenticity has always been an academic interest of mine, and something bordering on a personal fascination. When I lived in France, I wondered where my American self stopped and my French self began. I could tell that they were different. The tones of their voices were different. Their attitudes were different, too. My French self was tentative, in some ways, when words failed me, but also fairly argumentative, yet more polite with shopkeepers (as any Parisian will tell you, a pretty important skill). (Here I go again with the refracted self.)
Matar goes on: in writing a memoir, "the motor of the imagination, [which] gets excited about these black holes of not knowing, binds us to the person." The mysteries of my mother's life - the stories I have to reconstruct, the questions I can't ask, the specific emotions or thoughts to which I might not have had access - can only be filled in by me, now, and by the others left behind who loved her. We recreate her every time we talk about her, and we ensure that she will never disappear every time we say her name or picture her face or share a memory. The mystery, Matar soothes me, isn't as frightening as my mother's loss is. It's a way of knowing her in a different way, from a different distance, but it helps keep her alive all the same.
As I write this post, I watch an Italian movie (by way of Austrian filmmakers), La Pivellina. The tale, of a red-haired circus performer who comes across an abandoned two year-old, utterly charms me. I have to look up to catch the subtitles and really understand (since, at this point, my Italian matches directly up with that of the eponymous toddler). But sometimes I let the sound wash over me, in its music that I'm not yet able to decipher. Head down, looking at my writing, I try to catch intonation and inflection. I try to guess what the characters are talking about. It's not entirely unlike trying to represent a person on a page in the way Matar describes it, particularly when you are delving into their past, a half reconstructing a story you've been told, and half inventing it.
Memoiry!
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