Memory Writers Network

by Jerry Waxler

(You can listen to the podcast version by clicking the player control at the bottom of this post or download it from iTunes.)

During the cultural rebellion of the sixties, like many white kids, I tried to reach across the racial divide by emulating black slang and embracing soul music. My dark brown hair grew longer, and by the time I got home from the University of Wisconsin that first summer of 1966 it had curled into a tangle that looked vaguely like an Afro. My great-uncle Ben, with whom I had always got along, said “I didn’t know we had anything like that in the family.” We never spoke civilly to each other again. In Madison, Wisconsin the following year, some boys drove to campus to beat up kids who looked like me. They jumped out of their car, threw me to the ground and kicked me for a while to let me know that long hair was against the American way.

A memoir by Henry Louis Gates called “Colored People” made me think more about that incident. After all, this is the Melting Pot. We’re supposed to be able to absorb all kinds of people — the northern Europeans with their blond hair, Irish with their red hair, Mediterraneans, with their jet black hair. My own ancestors, eastern European Jews, inherited dark curly hair from our Semitic ancestors. Blending hasn’t always been easy. As each group arrived, a cry went throughout the land “We alreday know who we are and you are not us.” After a couple of generations, the children lost their accents and adopted clothes and customs that helped us blend. We intermarried. Voila. We’re in the mix.

But the resistance to blacks has persisted longer than for most other groups. I’ve thought about the reasons and the problems of that lack of mixture my whole life, but I’ve never thought about it as clearly as I did when I read Gates’ memoir, in which he explains what it was like growing up in the segregated south. As I listen to Gates, the magic of story reading takes over and I’m with him in the 1950’s and 60’s. At home he saw people of one color, and on television he saw another. As he ponders this contrast, and tries to sort out his place in the mix, one of the most revealing insights is the chapter on hair.

As a child, Gates’ barber complimented him on having a “good grade” of hair, meaning it wasn’t too curly. His good grade came with his genes, while others had to work for the desired straightness by greasing hair down and flattening it with a tight stocking cap. They ironed their hair. They used home chemical concoctions of potatoes and lye to defeat the curls. Or they spent big money on a chemical procedure call “processing.”

Through Gates’ story, I begin to see that hair has deep significance, and the more I think about how it fits into our emotional lives, the more of its power I see. Absence of hair is important to men who lose it at middle age, and chemotherapy patients who lose it as one of the demoralizing aspects of their illness. Prison camp inmates and new military recruits often have their hair shaved to reduce their individuality. Older people hide their gray to look young, while young people enhance sexual charisma by primping, extending, dying, or spiking.

So I shouldn’t be surprised that black people, to improve their image, would like to manage the impression their hair conveys. Working in my dad’s drugstore in the early 60’s I often saw black guys wearing these tight caps, or “do rags” as they were called. And my dad stocked a whole section of specialized hair products. Looking at it from the outside it seemed mysterious. Now I see they were trying to do the same thing Americans had been doing for centuries, trying to achieve entry into the Melting Pot, so they could participate in the American dream.

Hair defines the group a person is in. That simple, yet profound observation sends me searching. Surely something so important must insinuate itself in other aspects of my life. As I look for more evidence of the importance of hair I spot another crucial period.

Before I turned forty, my prematurely gray hair made me look like an old guy, an outsider among the young people I walked past every day at the university where I worked. I decided to dye it back to its original color, to reclaim my membership in the younger generation. The first time I went to visit my friends Larry and Ivy for lunch, their eyes opened wide. “It’s like instant youth.” My membership restored, I have been dying my hair ever since, despite research that suggested prolonged hair dying might cause a deadly form of cancer. When I was knocked down and kicked because my hair was too long, it never occurred to me to cut it. Now, I am once again placing my acceptance into a group above my own safety. With my dark hair, I’ll signal my membership in the youthful American Melting pot, even if it kills me.

Writing Prompt
Write a story about times in your life when you liked your hair, or didn’t like your hair. What message was your hair broadcasting?

When have you changed your hair to try to redefine or accentuate your acceptance into a group?

When has some one else’s hair sent you a message you had a hard time accepting?

Have you ever had the experience of being an outsider because of your hair, like the time I came home with long hair and was outside my family’s comfort zone, or like the way my friend’s blond daughter provoked cat calls in Egypt, where she stuck out like a… blond in Egypt.

To listen to the podcast version click the player control below:

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (101)

by Jerry Waxler

When I was in college, I was attacked by strangers, knocked down on the ground, and kicked in the head. It sounds like something I would remember. But after a few months I forgot it, and it took me 34 years to remember it again. From one point of view, that seems impossible. But it turns out that such a response is perfectly natural. Since trauma cannot peacefully coexist with normal life, we find ways to deal with it, and one of the most common ways is forgetting. Forgetting may feel comforting in a way. If we’re not remembering the pain, perhaps it won’t hurt. A variation on forgetting is to be hyper-aware of it, but refuse to think about it. The memory takes on a rigid form that repeats over and over without deeper review. In either case, the incident remains in the same basic shape as it was when you first experienced it. Like an ancient mummy, the episode remains entombed in exactly the form it was in when you laid it to rest. Shrouded in bad ideas and rotten feelings, it emanates an unpleasant odor that occasionally wafts up from its grave.

Aside from the fact that we never completely kill it, and it comes back to life when we least expect it, one of the worst problems about this attempted resolution of trauma is that we bury valuable parts of ourselves along with the pain. A veteran who tries to forget a war may in the process push aside the innocence and pleasures of his childhood. A tragic death or betrayal of a spouse could bury years of healthy life experience and mutual support.

If you could disinter those remains, and evaluate them using today’s perspective, you would find nuances and lessons that could help you cope in a new, more resilient way. You could allow the events to become part of your story, making you feel more whole. However, it’s not easy to revisit those memories. They were unpleasant to start with. That’s why you buried them. And messing with them now feels like waking the dead. So, you continue to avoid them, and they continue to stink. This normal fear of falling backwards into pain prevents us from finding lasting relief.

While we can’t change the past, we can change our relationship to it. By telling the story, we see it from a higher vantage point, see how it fit in with what came before and after, and provide more insights into the other characters and beyond them to the stage they acted on. For example, when I was assaulted on the street of my quiet college town, my sense of safety had been violated. But now, decades later, I can see so much more about the forces that shaped this event.

The Vietnam War was creating a vast upheaval in our way of life. We were all on edge. I believed the war attacked what I thought the world should be, and corrupted my sense of safety and sanity. I knew American boys were getting hurt. I didn’t want to be one of them. So I protested. As I look back on that night, I realize now the boys from a rural town who attacked me were almost old enough to be drafted. They might have had older brothers or cousins already over there. My protests were supposed to protect all of them.

But they weren’t seeing it that way. They saw this war as necessary to defend their family against the encroachment of Communism. The war must be fought to hold back the forces of evil and to preserve the sanctity of their way of life. The campus protests run by long-hair communist sympathizers threatened what they held dear. To protect their world, it made sense for them to go out and find someone with long hair and beat him up. They were protesting the protests, standing up for what they believed, just as I had done, and were trying to protect the world as they knew it. In fact, their actions were the most honorable actions possible. Our lives were more intertwined than I imagined.

By writing about the night I was assaulted, I can turn it into a narrative. I walked along the busy street on a peaceful summer night with my Greek friend Elias, a soft-spoken math graduate student with short hair, and his girl friend Joan. We heard the boys coming up behind us, yelling. I turned and the ringleader tackled me and the other ones swarmed around me and kicked. Elias asked them to stop. His association with me earned him a split lip. Joan screamed, cars honked, a getaway car pulled up and the boys drove off. The intern at the hospital who was accustomed to treating survivors of barroom brawls had no idea how violated I felt. Not wanting to order tests, he brushed off my headache. “Of course it hurts,” he said. “You were kicked in the head.” It turned out I was fine, except for the aches and disorientation. And then it was dawn, and the police took me back to the scene of the attack to see if we could find my contact lens. (They weren’t disposable in those days). A few hours earlier, I thought the police were my enemies. Now, in my moment of need, these two men were down on their hands and knees helping me. I felt an unexpected flush of gratitude.

Putting it on paper lets me get it out of my head, and reduces some of its hold on my unconscious. On paper it doesn’t look as bad, and when I squint, I see it as an interesting story. And the most important benefit of the story is that I can see that even after bad things happen, life goes on.

Compared with some traumatic events my experience was like a visit to a botanical garden. Imagine an older brother of one of the boys who beat me up. Instead of getting kicked in the head by a sneaker, he was in a jungle on the other side of the world, month after month shooting and being shot at, seeing dear comrades blown to pieces before his eyes. For years to come, he would be assaulted by memories which return over and over with such force, they once again tear into his sense of safety and self. And so, he can’t get through the horror because each time he gets near it, it pulls him in and repeats.

Such events seem burned deeply into inaccessible parts of the brain, forever calling out, and yet forever hiding. And so we are terrified of being devoured by our own past. But as long as there is a tomorrow, there is hope of achieving a new perspective. And that new perspective will take the form of a new story.

When you convert your memories into stories, at first you are pulled back into the emotions of the event. But then, as you gain the knack of telling stories, you move beyond those initial moments of pain. Storytelling drags you along, through the trauma and keeps going, to the next day and the next, until eventually you find yourself on more stable ground.

Because of my mind’s abhorrence for those events, the memories went underground, or under something, some primal layer, like a wound that wouldn’t heal so I learned to ignore it. Decades later, I was traumatized along with hundreds of millions of others by airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center. I wanted to help in some way so I took a workshop to learn how to talk to victims of trauma. In the practice session, to participate authentically I unearthed my lost memory of being beaten. As I told the story, I started to notice things about it I had not thought about in years. The mugging had made me extraordinarily sensitive about being different, so to protect myself from danger, I decided to stop being different. I stopped protesting.

After I remembered the trauma, I saw the thought process that scared me into silence and compared it to the ideal values I wanted to live by. I decided to reclaim my right to have different opinions and when appropriate to let others know those opinions. It occurred to me that it is inevitable that I am different. Everyone is different and unique. We can’t help it. Now, instead of being driven by the decisions of a scared young man, I am working on a more considered and more public approach to my opinions that allow me to have a more vibrant relationship to the world. Diving into painful memories has helped me grow to my full potential as an individual human being.

 by Jerry Waxler

“Beatles.” This word contains the memories of a generation. Who among us has not seen videos of them waving as they disembarked from the plane on their first American tour? As they’re playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the Ed Sullivan show, the camera pans to the girl screaming so hard she has to hold onto her face with both hands so her head won’t explode. Since such scenes were part of your life, you might want to tell about them. But to a listener these culturally loaded words sound like clichés. Events that happened to you also happened to hundreds of millions of others. We’ve heard and seen these images until we are weary of them.

If you tell a story with loaded words, people will hear what they already know, rather than learning about you. The loaded words will wash out the individual meaning from your story. So how do you write about the past, without falling into this trap? Use the storyteller’s advice. Slow down, set up the scene, and tell the reader how they affected you in particular.

So how could I unpack the meaning of the word Beatles and turn it into a unique image in my own life? I can see myself standing at the record store in Madison, Wisconsin, where I stopped on my way home every day from class, to stare at the rack of new releases. My mind was blazing with an almost supernatural desire, as if each album might release a Genii that would grant my every dream. But describing a boy standing at a record rack doesn’t give the reader much to go on. To share my unique feelings, I have to set up a scene in a way that you’ll be able to relate to.

Here’s a piece of advice on this topic by author and writing teacher Philip Gerard, from his book “Writing a book that makes a difference.” He says, “The key is always to include your reader in the process by which you arrive at your position. Instead of demanding that the reader experience anger or love simply because you say so, create for your reader the same experience that led to your reaction.”

So I try to remember a scene that would help me show my relationship to music in the sixties and I remembered the summer when the Revolver album was released. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I wanted to get back to campus early. When I returned in mid-August, all the summer classes were over, and even the faculty and staff were away on vacation. Madison, Wisconsin was essentially a ghost town. I didn’t have anywhere to live yet, but an acquaintance was out of town and told me I could crash at her place.

I walked in to the apartment building, musty from years of student tenants, and set down my belongings. My stuff was stored in another friend’s basement so all I had with me was a suitcase and the Revolver, which I had picked up from the record store on my way in to town. As soon as I sat down, I took out the album, turning it over and searching the graphics, the liner notes, and even the names of the production staff as if they might reveal some secret.

Ripping off the flimsy cellophane, I pulled the record envelope out, and then grabbed the record by the edges between my open palms to avoid letting any finger oil smudge the surface. Positioning the record over the turntable, I dropped it gently, feeling the anticipation not only that this would be the first time I listened to it, but also disappointment that this would be the last time I would ever listen to it for the first time. This troubled me because records lose 40% of their quality after the first playing, wearing down the little plastic ridges that jiggle the needle to create the sound.

In rapt attention, I turned towards the speakers and listened. And as I entered each new song, I felt a wave of excitement. Somehow the Beatles had broken with their genre over and over, as if they were inventing a new style of rock and roll in each song. I was especially smitten by the haunting violin accompaniment like cries of sadness, wails really, on “Eleanor Rigby.” I wondered who she was, and why I felt so drawn to her.

That afternoon, I left the apartment to buy food, and I saw a girl walking my way. A person! As she came nearer, I smiled. The smile of a stranger always made me feel okay, like the world was safer and more fun. So I smiled at this stranger, and she kept walking past me, as if she didn’t see me. Despite the long, cruel winters, Madison in August is blazingly hot and muggy. I looked around at the apartments that would in a few weeks be teeming with kids living in every possible space. The houses had not been painted recently nor were the gardens groomed. It was a student neighborhood, run by landlords we never saw, and kids who were just passing through. And now they were empty. I wondered where my home was. Certainly not Pennsylvania. I was no longer a child, and it was time to get away from there. And I didn’t feel at home here either, where there were no other students, and the only person I saw didn’t even smile at me.

The one thing I did have, the one element in my life that made me feel connected at that moment was the Beatles. Their passion for breaking with all the things that were wrong with the world leapt out at me. But rather than providing simple answers, they asked questions, set to music. Not just any music but orchestral music and fresh melodies and rhythms. They poured their creative energy into the album to let me know they shared my sense of urgency. We had entered a pact in which we agreed that our questions were important, were powerful. I closed my eyes, and hummed along with the lyrics, already starting to burn into my memory.

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

I too lamented about life, while those violins tore into my heart. Hearing the lyrics made me feel more peaceful, understood, and one with the world.