The Drumming: A Memoir

Memory, a tool for survival

As promised in yesterday's post, here follows an excerpt from The Drumming, one of a the passages in the manuscript where my mother discusses why and how she used memory as a tool for survival.

Memory was my main survival tool.  It was my armour against my mother and her continual attempts to discredit me.  Early on, I decided my mission in life was to tell the real story, which meant that I needed to retain everything until I reached adulthood. Since I hadn’t been born with a photographic brain, to compensate I developed other abilities.  I figured out that the only sure way to remember something was to think of it every day.  So each night before I went to sleep, I went through the ritual of repeating my entire history to myself, going back to the moment of first memory, a time before I could talk.  Because I didn’t know dates at first, I attached events to each other, so I would be able to say something happened three days after this or two days before that.  With no calendar to consult, and no access to writing tools, I was still doing this at age six. 

As well as retaining the facts, I learned to visualize past events, because without visualization there was far too much information to be stored in the memory.  Had a window been open or closed?  I might need to know, but ahead of time I couldn’t know I was going to need to know.  In effect, I somehow taught myself how to move my head backward in time and walk through former events, seeing and hearing almost as if they were happening all over again.  This allowed me to pull out odd bits of information I would never have made efforts to remember.  It's a talent I still have, provided I can put myself into the exactly right moment in time. 

By the time I turned six, my daily memory work had become automatic.  With an eventual goal of telling everything, I had to notice everything; the tiny peripheral details too.  Details like commodes in the gatehouse bedrooms, seen once briefly on a tour... a servants’ gate screened from white eyes, once sighted but never used... the scrubbing of a water storage tank in the roof, a concealed tank never seen at all... moreover, the job itself mere hearsay, because it had to be done during a month when I was no longer in India.  I knew far more about my past than any child could possibly be expected to know. 

Today, most memory tapes are back, with sufficient concentration.  (Which is not to say that I remember everything.) Example: in recovery, I knew a certain place in Central India was a flag station on a rail line; I visited it once at age two. After several tries (vouched for by the correspondence of others) I was proven right — pitted against the two elderly Central India expatriates who had told me I must be wrong.  A missionary who still lives in Ratlam (who also didn’t know the answer) finally asked an Indian with familiar with local geography.  The tiny place was as my two-year-old insisted: a flag station. 

Another startling example, once again with supporting correspondence: in 1995, early in memory return, while hunting in my mind for the name of Mrs. Powell, my teacher at age five, my brain produced the name “Miss Ellis’.  I wrote to the Kodai school, a small school that in the thirties had a staff of ten or so.  The former Miss Ellis, astonishingly, was alive.  We talked by long distance.  It turned out she had not been my teacher, but she had acted as a substitute teacher for Mrs Powell for two weeks in 1937, an absence I had already written about! 

I had to ask myself: why on earth would anyone’s brain make the effort to remember a substitute teacher from age five, sixty years after the fact? This kind of question concerns me, so I had to root even deeper in the past.  Eventually, I got back to the exact reason I had retained her name — a reason told [later in The Drumming,] in Chapter Four.  Soon enough, I could remember Miss Ellis herself (pretty, curly dark hair, a whiz at math, in her twenties in 1937).  Mrs. Powell was not truly forgotten — I easily picked her photo out of an ancient group picture taken in the 1920s.  The only thing that couldn’t be seen was her crooked teeth.  I cannot think of better examples to show that my memory — while not a hundred percent perfect — was highly developed.

Still deep within my mom's writings, I'd have to agree.  Above are two small examples of many in the manuscript that illustrate the wonders of my mother's memory.

The wierd and wonderful world of traumatic memory

Memory is an amazing tool.  Subject to human frailty, absolutely, but sometimes astounding in it's power.

That my mother was able to recall minute details of her life 60 years after the fact is truly incredible. 

Her atypical power of recall can be explained by the unique circumstances of how she trained herself to retain these details at a young age, and also by the way traumatic "amnesia" freezes memories, locks them away, keeping them largely intact if inaccessible. 

Finally, the events of my mother's manuscript take place against the backdrop of an India that was unlike any place my mother lived again, and which was to disappear quickly after Indian Independence a few years later, and this contrast helped to freeze certain details in my mother's mind.

As I read and edit the manuscript, I am constantly getting glimpses into how the mind works.  Tomorrow, an excerpt from The Drumming, my mother's own words on the subject.

Another Indian connection

Last week I found out that my husband's cousin was recently named Canada's High Commissioner for India. 

Joseph Caron has been a rising star in the Canadian foreign service for some time, and so his latest appointment is not a surprise, but it seemed somehow serindipidous to me.  Everything I am reading, watching, hearing seems to have an India connection to me lately, and some (however small) connection to my mom's story.

So, is 2009 the year for a trip to India?  It would allow me to do a bit of research through old court records that might help document and prove my mother's incredible story.  Some of that information will likely be housed (if it still exists) in New Delhi, where the High Commission is located...  But I am not convinced a trip is in the cards, or even necessary right now.

My mother was (like many survivors of traumatic abuse) obsessed with proof.  Perhaps it comes from the extraordinariness of the events, the fact that she had been an amnesiac for so many years, or the fact that she was disbelieved so heartily as a small child. 

As a reader (and editor) I am not convinced that reams of proof does the story any good.  As I have alluded to before, it's one of the struggles I have as I work with this material.  Balancing my mom's need to exorcise various demons, with my desire to make the story accessible and a good read (thereby ensuring a larger audience).

Also, another reality hits in 2009;  my official job search begins.  My next paying gig will almost certainly dictate that this trip is not going to happen in the short or medium term. 

That said, my mother wanted her ashes scattered on the holy Ganges river, and so there a trip to India in the future (for me or another member of our family). If I am lucky, and if it's me, perhaps I'll get there while there is a family connection in the capital.

A momentous day...

I just got through the first pass of my edit of The Drumming -- notes on the hard copy at this stage. 

My mother was a good writer, and so my editing job is relatively simple. I think there are some structural and even tonal issues with the manuscript that need to be worked out, and I am wrestling with how much to change. (She was the one with a dozen published titles, after all!) More on that struggle in a future post.

As I was reading (and it's not the first time I have read this material), I shed tears more than once.

Yes, the author is my (dead) mother and, yes, I miss her more than ever. 

(There were several times when I was reading the manuscript that I heard my mother's voice, and even times when I felt that she was speaking directly to me.)

But there is more to it.  There is a poignancy that goes beyond the family affiliation. 

I was filled with the sense of one individual's small footprint in a much larger story (India on the cusp of Independence, a world on the brink of a World War) and how these two streams so often intersect, even when an individual is not a "player" in world events. 

As I work through the physical edit, I will be posting some shorter excerpts and preparing longer ones for download over the next couple of weeks.  (Email me or subscribe to this blog if you want a heads up when new content is available.)

What's with the blog?

Why am I structuring this website as a blog?

After all, the site is in support of my mom's work, and she would have not been able to distinguish  a blog from a bulletin board.

The blog is a simple way for me to create a website, a site that readers, prospective readers, agents and publishers (she typed, ever hopeful) can visit to find out more about The Drumming project and my mother's story.

I also happen to believe in the power of blogs for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is my own experience as a marketer in tech companies.  One of the early champions of blogging I ran into was my friend Alec Saunders (who was going on about it in a conversation we had way back in 2000, I think). In fact, I recently invited Alec to present at Zone5ive, a forum for B2B tech marketers, and if anyone  entered the room a skeptic, they did not, I am certain, leave that way. 

Like Alec, and loads of other marketers out there, I understand that blogging has huge SEO benefits (so that your website shows up higher in the list of search results). In fact, your SEO strategy is probably stillborn without a blog.

Thought leadership? Hell no!

My one quibble with Alec and lots of other marketers posting on this subject would be that they maintain that one of the main purposes of a blog should be to carve out a position of thought-leadership.  (Coincidentally, most of the people saying this ARE thought-leaders in one field or another.)

I just don't think that most people starting blogs today will become known as thought leaders at the centre of their particular universe.  Does that mean they shouldn't blog.  Again, hell no!

In any case, thought leadership is not the purpose of this blog.  Friends and colleagues might call me thoughtful (and I hope to be a thoughtful blogger), but I am not likely to get accused of being a "thought-leader," especially in a world I am just beginning to explore, the world of writers and their readers, and all the people and steps in between.

Get to know me (and my product)

A blog is an excellent tool to fulfill another marketing imperative: the imperative to allow customers "try before you buy" experiences, proving the customer (reader, publisher) a taste of what they might be getting into if they slap their money down on the table.

This is something I don't hear a lot of the blog pundits addressing and it holds especially true in service companies, where the people are the product.

For a project like this, where words and memories are the product, the blog format allows me to give brief excerpts of my mom's work and her story, to encourage the downloading of longer samples, and ultimately to buy (whatever that means in today's evolving world of publishing). 

I will also use the blog to keep people posted on the journey of The Drumming, the inevitable obstacles in getting this book out to an audience, and the joys of working on my mother's own mission.

So, welcome to the blog.  Let me know what you think. 

My mother's own words

Today, I am posting a small excerpt from The Drumming, something I will do from time to time on this site.  (I will also be posting longer excerpts for download on the site, hopefully in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!)

About this excerpt:  A bond has formed between young Barbara and one of the house servants, a punkah-puller named Gopal. (Gopal operated the fans in the family's Patna residence).  He had a growing sense that the memsahib, Barbara's mother, was cruel and dangerous, that she wanted to do her own daughter harm. Barbara was relieved that she had an adult she could confide in, even if he was almost powerless to help her. Barbara's mother was away for a number of days undergoing a procedure at a nearby hospital while this friendship was allowed to grow.

...

As I was sharing so much with Gopal, one of the things I shared with him was Dolly.  Dolly had been given to me by my daddy when I was two years old.  My mother had damaged the doll so often that I had finally used the other contents of my toybox, such as they were, to make a construction that prevented my mother from getting at her. 

Actually, I could no longer even get at Dolly myself, but because of mother's absence I was able to bring the entire toybox outside.  There was a concealed access so I could show Dolly's face.  I let Gopal in on the secret of the trick entrance.  He had a sick look on his face after hearing about the ways Dolly had been damaged, most of which he couldn't see because her body was locked into a sort of Chinese puzzle construction.  He could not see the cut-off arms, the razor-marked kid body, or the broken toes, but he saw the smashed nose, the missing eye, the discoloured cheeks and the slashed hair.  Gopal saw the rest of the toybox's pitiful contents too, but it was Dolly I really wanted to show. I told Gopal she was my private life.

Sharing Dolly with Gopal resulted in one of the most moving moments of my childhood.  Gopal had said very little to me except to express anger about my mother's abuse of Dolly, but he must have said a whole lot more to the senior handyman Hamid, at whose home he took lodging.[...]

Several days after Gopal's viewing of the toybox Hamid and Aziz [who worked with Hamid] presented me with a toy.  Hamid, who was the spokesman for the two, told me it was a toy used by Indian children.  He said he would have made me one long ago if he had known I had nothing to play with.

I thought it was the most beautifully made toy I had ever seen.  It looked a bit like a square bolo bat with a square hole in the centre.  The corners were slightly rounded.  Two different kinds of wood were used in the construction, one darker, one paler, with the dark wood -- probably mahogany -- used partly as a decoration, and partly because the edge had to be a harder wood as it took more punishment.  The woods were joined together so you couldn't see a seam.  Attached to the handle there was a string, and hanging on the string was a stone that was an almost perfect sphere, flattened in shape.  It was a lovely stone that could only have been smoothed in a riverbed, imperceptibly grainy in texture and very satisfactory to hold in the hand, with not a single flaw in the shape.  It had a hole drilled right through its centre so it could be anchored securely on the string. If you tossed the stone just exactly right, you could make it go through the square hole in the bat.

The greatest wonder was the handle. It was whittled into a flattened pear shape, then beautifully sandpapered until it was smooth as silk.  Even though entirely hand-fashioned, no mould could have produced a handle formed more perfectly.  The whole bat was a pleasure to touch, but the handle was especially marvellous, satiny soft to the fingers, curved to nestle into the palm as if it belonged there.  It was like holding butter.

Hamid said Aziz had done the stone-drilling, while he had done the carpentry.  Hamid told me Aziz's part might not look as hard but it was even harder, because it took a long time and a lot of patience to drill the hole through the stone.[...]

Living in white seclusion, I had never had opportunity to watch Indian children at play, but I had an idea that this was probably far more exquisite than the simple con�structions most Indian parents made.  In my entire childhood, next to Dolly it was the most beautiful present I ever received.

Hamid said he understood from Gopal that I would not be allowed to keep the toy if my mother knew, so we would keep it hidden behind a bush right outside the exit of the Indians' compound.[...] If my mother happened to spot the thing lying behind the bush, she would think it was an Indian child's toy.  If that made her cross, she would be told the child had thrown it by mistake and hadn't been able to retrieve it because it was lying on forbidden ground.  But my mother would probably never spot it, Hamid said, because she always stayed well away from the compound.

That night I cried for a very long time in my bed.  Real tears again, but this time for myself alone.[...] I knew I had been given a gift from the heart.  But I think most of the tears were because Hamid and Aziz had reminded me that I was not an adult at all, but a six-year-old child who had never had a childhood.

...

I find this passage very poignant.  My mother had so much coping and surviving to do, you sometimes forget she is only 6 during the events of this book. This is one of those moments where the reader is reminded. 

Let me know what you think.

Vassanji's India: A Place Within

Last night I went to an event put on by the Ottawa Writers' Festival, a reading by the wonderful author M.G. Vassanji (author of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, one of my favourite novels, among others) from his latest work, A Place Within, a memoir on his travels over the past 15 years to India. 

Vassanji was born and raised in Kenya.  His parents were part of a large ex-pat Indian community there.  He was later educated in England (Cambridge) before moving to Canada (as a nuclear physicist!) and settling here.  The Vassanji fiction that I have enjoyed is replete with people that call many countries (and no one country) home.  "In-between" citizens.

It was as a successful published author that Vassanji had his first opportunity to travel to India.

It was January 1993. The desperation must have shown on my face to take in all that I possibly could. This was not something that I had articulated or resolved, and yet I recall an anxiety as I travelled the length and breadth of the country, senses raw to every new experience, that even in the distraction of a blink I might miss something profoundly significant.

From A Place Within, by M.G. Vassanji

Of course, I bought a copy and am thrilled at the chance to read it, especially as it will form an excellent backdrop as I work on my mom's memoirs.

My favourite part of last night's event? The deliberate, considered way that Vassanji responded to all questions.  Some examples:

When asked about his reaction to the US election of Barack Obama the previous evening (as someone who has spent time in the US, and someone with Kenyan origins), he described his optimism and his joy; how his cab driver to his hotel in Ottawa, also with origins outside Canada, had shared that sense that Obama was "their" president.  He considered for a moment longer and said there was "something there that changed the world.  We have to see now what happens." 

There were many glistening gems in Vassanji's remarks last night.  "Here (in North America) we are constantly purifying ourselves," and that ground travel in places like Africa and India allows you to "smell the sweat of your neighbour." 

In order to write A Place Within, Vassanji had to better understand his relationship to India. "It took me a long time to find a voice.... It is a memoir, not of India, but of myself in India." 

That he is so articulate and authentic at the same moment is a wonder. 

A(nother) memoir worth a look...

In preparing myself to work with my mom's memoirs, I decided to shift my reading list, away from the literary fiction I usually favour, to include more literary non-fiction.  One of the titles I have recently finished reading is Family Romance: A Love Story, by John Lanchester.

It is slow-moving family history, and also a true-life detective story. The book is aptly sub-titled "A love story," because the author treats his subject matter, his parents and the at times problematic decisions they made, with humility, respect, and, yes, love. Mommy Dearest this is not!

My favorite part of the book would have to be the "reveal" of the pivotal choice his mother makes before the author is born, one that has reverberations throughout her life and that of her only child.  I won't give away the story here, but it is worth reading for the gradual build to this point in the book, and the delicacy with which it is handled.

If I had a complaint about the book (difficult, because the writing so fine and the subject matter interesting) it would be that it is very slow moving at times. Deliberate, layered and, and somehow too slow at times.  Still, I was engaged throughout.

Weird connections.

I knew nothing about the author or his history when I picked this book up, and so I was amazed to read about his mother's work in Kodaikanal, where my mother went to school for a brief but important period. It was in Kodai, in 1937, that my mother completed grade 1, and had her first experience of a sympathetic adult who seemed to believe her that all was not well in my mother's relationship with her own mother

There was no overlap, other than that of place. (Lanchester's mother was there in the 50s, and my mother would not have been in a Catholic school there).  Nonetheless, I found myself gobbling up this part of Lanchester's book, hoping for other connections.

In any case, I took this rare connection of a sign that I was doing the right thing by my mother of supplementing my reading with other creative non-fiction.