I We are standing in the doorway of our grandparents’ basement apartment, staring straight through the house to the back door. Step outside, and you are at the bottom of a square, concrete pit covered by a black…
All my life, people have been telling me to write nonfiction: “Your life is so interesting; you should write a memoir.”
The trouble with writing about my life is that resilience narratives are chiefly focussed on triumph. Becoming, or escaping, or overcoming. Something with a terminus.
Trauma does not have a terminus. It is recursive. Time and memory double back upon themselves, folding two points together from the fourth dimension. I think of time as a spiral. Each disruption leaves a ripple in the pattern, a wound around which we must navigate. In this way, what was once a spiral becomes an irregular shape. The bumps and gnarls of a burl, the wavering rings of a tree. Something alive that keeps growing if you let it, smoothing over the places where it was cut.
It didn’t occur to me that I could write something that mirrored that shape until I was introduced to Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos and, at the same time, re-introduced to Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Anzaldúa writes: “A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.” Under the influence of these texts, I began to write not from an idea, or plot, or even thinking about trauma at all, but from the Borderlands: beyond presupposed genre or form. To sift through the detritus that is found at the bottom of any artist’s mind and fashion something the way a child might make a found collage.
First, an image that has haunted me since childhood: staring out the back door at the stooped mound of my grandfather’s body, his brown skin like a Ford’s leather seats under the summer sun. Then, whatever images came naturally. In this way, “Heirlooms” emerged like a magician pulling colourful scarves from their mouth, each piece unexpected and tied to the last by its corners.
In The Blue Clerk, the poet and the blue clerk—who are the same woman—navigate mountainous reams of writing, negotiating vigorously what may, eventually, end up on the pages the outside world sees. In “Heirlooms,” the disorientation and chaos experienced by my younger self is viewed through the pane of my current understanding, narrated and commented-upon by the me of the present. By choosing to reveal only these selected frames of light, sound, and colour, I felt able to characterise traumatic memory—especially my history of seizures. “Heirlooms” illuminates the Borderlands between past and current self.
In her opening lines, Brand writes: “I have withheld more than I have written.” This is the case for “Heirlooms.” Each kaleidoscopic moment tumbles into the next, repeating but not quite the same. In this way, I hope, the reader can feel and see as I do when I return to these memories, as beautiful as they are painful: truth like refracted light.
K. A. JAGAI is a queer and multiracial writer, artist, and editor from Brooklyn, New York. Their writing has appeared in Frontier Poetry, Electric Literature, The Quarryman, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere. They are a graduate of Bennington College and a current student at the University College of Cork, where they are working on their debut poetry collection. In both art and writing, they are seeking that light within themselves and others that can only be seen when one is forced into the dark. Find them on Instagram @kintsukroi.
