What Is A Memoir?
by Janet Berliner
As I began to write my memoir–which may or may not ever see the light of day–I tried to get a fix on what that meant. Is a memoir “Just the facts, Ma’am?” or is it, as Gore Vidal wrote in Point To Point Navigation, “…how one remembers one’s life.”
More than whether or not it was fact or interpretation, I realized that my memories were circular, joined together like a Slinky toy, and that I had to begin with how I became obsessed by words–
By the time I began to realize that I would have to leave South Africa, I was nineteen. Words were already my passion. I had been reading fluently since before I was four, a skill derived mainly from the upside-down-study of newspapers, flowing in place of a tablecloth over a card table in my father’s kitchen. Upside-down because I read them from the floor beneath the table, sharing my space with a cat whose very existence terrified me almost as much as I scared it when I grew hungry and ate from its bowl. That’s where I sat one day out of every week, fulfilling my father’s visitation rights. Only he was never there. Not with the track open and the horses at the starting gate.
While he played the ponies, I was left in the care of his demented red-haired wife, Iris. She took me straight from the front door to the card table, prepared with its newspaper cover beneath a lot of bottles of beer which I knew would be consumed by the time I was picked up at the end of the day. As she drank, she paced around the table, talking about my family and about me. Cursing us with words such as I had never heard. Each bottle she emptied was thrown into a mounting pile in the corner, accompanied by a loud belch and the crash of glass against glass.
I lasted six months before I told my mother. She applied for the visitation rights to be rescinded and, after I testified in court, there were no more visits.
By then I had realized that the words I’d learned to read had meaning. Quickly, books became my constant and often my only companions. My mother and I moved from place to place. I was transferred from one school to another. Making friends didn’t seem like a good idea under the circumstances. I read while walking to school, learning how to glance up and back fast to avoid losing my place. I read under my blankets with a flashlight, except on the nights The Creaking Door or Mandrake the Magician were on the radio I kept hidden under my pillow. I knew that they clapped together coconut shells to make the sound of horses’ hooves but it spoiled nothing because, for me, it was all about storytelling. Even at that early age, I wanted to be the person who wrote the stories. When something bad happened, I thought it’s okay because I can use this one day in a story. When something good happened, I thought, I have to remember this so that one day I will use it in a story.
When nothing happened, and I was between books, I went out looking for story material–and generally found it. At school, I did well academically but was constantly reprimanded for asking too many questions. One teacher had me write “Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles me” three hundred times.
Probably the only person who understood any of this was my grandmother who quickly turned whatever happened to me into a story, leaving spaces for me to fill in as we went along. Like old Sophia in The Golden Girls, she had a story to cover every eventuality. I never grew tired of her tales, nor did it occur to me that she might be embellishing the truth. She was the essential pragmatist who provided me with a tough core as I moved from father to father–four in all, not counting the “uncles”–school to school, thirteen of them before I matriculated, and house to flat to boarding house.
It was she who taught me to turn those experiences and the myriad that followed into stories as a tool to hold onto my sanity. Without her, I might have fallen apart before I found out not what but who I was.
A writer.
For that, I am extremely grateful, because it has allowed me to live my life to its fullest. I have run without fear toward gunshots in a marketplace in Jerusalem, stopped to tear up and throw away my Press credentials in East Berlin when a Russian soldier with a rifle bore down upon me, argued myself out of being shot by Algerian rebels at the top of the Eiffel Tower.
My life has been exciting and fun and horrific. But never, ever has it been dull.
I decided that I was a writer when I was eight and won a National writing competition with a poem called Brotherhood. I carried the congratulatory note in the pocket of my hand-me-down pants but didn’t mention it to anybody in my family. They were impressed by practical achievements, not airy-fairy stuff like that. I didn’t mind because I figured that, too, was the way it was in all families. My grandparents owned a small haberdashery in the Indian quarter of the Southern Suburbs. Next door there was a shop that sold fruits and vegetables and smelled of curry from the house behind it where the owners lived. My grandfather, an artist but not a linguist, made signs for their shop and for his: Poor Wool Suit. 7 Pounds. With the 7 struck through. I worked there on Sundays, covering hollow shells with fabric to turn them into buttons, something at which I had gained expertise at four or so, standing on a carton to reach the button machine.
My mother did not make buttons. She had been a film star and a singer and a model in Berlin and spoke seven languages. After I was born, she joined the South African army and worked at Cape Town Castle as a bookkeeper. I don’t remember much about that time, but I do recall the street photographers who wandered around Cape Town. They took Brownie snapshots, developed them, and pinned them up on the inside walls of little houses that looked like the forerunners of Photomat. I have one photograph that was taken of me at about three, cute as can be, holding the hands of my mother and grandmother. The photo was used for the cover of SNAPSHOTS, an anthology of mother-daughter fiction I edited with Joyce Carol Oates.
When I was older, my mother–Mutti, as I called her–became South Africa’s first travelling saleslady. Every day was a battle to make a living, to pay bills, to put a little aside just in case. I was afraid to ask just in case what. Already, I was being possessed by two muses, the writing muse, and the one that drove me to believe that while not all Men were born good, philosophically all people were born equal in the community of Man.
Born into Brotherhood and with the potential to communicate with words in a universe of infinite variety where the hand that rocks the cradle is also capable of rocking the world–the voice that sings lullabies can be a Janis Joplin, wailing for life and pleading for meaning; the hand that pounds porridge in a clay pot can pound a drum, remove a brain tumour . . ..
To me, music and words are inseparable. I was born a writer in my consciousness, a filmmaker in my head, a dancer in my pulse. I hear syncopation in the sound of words, rhythm in their meaning. I see scenes choreographed, my characters come fleshed and fully formed–breathing and hating, sweating and loving, the blood in their veins singing the music of words.
They are the blood in my veins, the stuff of my survival.
