Imperfect
A week has gone past with no writing. On Sunday I heard that I did not get the grant I was hoping for, and it was hard to focus after that. Today, though, I know I must start again and I am glad to see there is blue outside the window, so I go for a walk in the park. This is what I do first because it settles my mind.
I think about The Party. This is the story I’m reworking using original notebooks, written in Cuba a few years ago. There is the static ‘final’ version I’ve produced, which seems to have no soul, and a lot of ragged material from the time. I can’t find the way in. How to connect the two?
Yesterday, I went to hear Biblical scholar Avivah Zornberg speak. She looked into the text and asked, how do we find our voice?
Moses, it is said, had a speech impediment, and when God asked him to talk to the people, Moses replied: ‘I can not be heard. The people are not going to believe me. They will not listen to my voice.’
‘But,’ said God, ‘it does not matter that you have not the eloquence of Aaron – he could not get my message across. I want you to speak for yourself.’
In the act of writing, Avivah said, we accept our own otherness, rather than rejecting it. And the reader, encountering this otherness within the work, meets hidden aspects of themself. Reader and writer create one another, as did Moses and God.
Aaron was eloquent, but communicated nothing. Moses, who stammered and stuttered, was the one people heard.
I put my two versions of The Party side by side. As the story stands, there is little indication of the tension between the narrator and her surroundings. There is nothing to show her distance from Charo, the Cuban friend who has brought her to the party, and his family. I’ve smoothed it all out. Only one paragraph expresses her (mild) estrangement:
“I took a rest on Ramón’s lumpy bed and, shivering in the chill wind of the dusk, covered myself with the yellow candlewick bedspread. Charo brought me meat and lemonade. I curled into a ball on one side, hands in front of my face, but could not shut out the fretful, insistent shouting of the guests. It seemed to be coming from only a few feet away – outside the window and just beyond the bedroom door.”
But what I wrote originally about that night was much rougher. Here are some extracts from my notebook:
I decide to retell The Party in this voice. My narrator will still observe the life around her, but will also report the life within herself. I’m going to try weaving segments of writing from the notebooks into the narrative I already have – and see how the patchwork turns out.
It’s not so much that I want to write ‘the truth’ of that night, but more that I want to find the stammering emotional centre of the experience, and return this to the work.
