A Complicated Take on Voice

This book is like a cup of tea. It’s not my cup of tea. But as a lover of teas, I can find a deep appreciation in what others are sipping on here. As I’ve grown into my own voice and self and womanhood, the writings of TTW have greatly lost their appeal. Particularly, as a queer and Afrikan and Coharie woman, I’ve swallowed more than my fair share of white woman logics on womanhood before I realized I had to find my voice separate from them. 

Is her feminism really my feminism? Is her sense of loss really my sense of loss? Do I need the discovery of their voice to, not find my voice, but rather be heard? Do I need to rely on them to learn “Afrikan women were carrying the environmental crisis on their backs” in order to do revolutionary work? Are our stories, witnessed, caught as memories instead of ongoing, just parts of their stories? Which women do I wish to read, for political sake and for sanity sake? How much colonial violence that is “innocent” must I have to read, swallow, and feel poisoned with?

Where in her nature are my ancestors, is my ancestral lands and languages, are the birds that my people see as the life-force. Our relationship to everything that she writes with substance on are deeply different and yet, perhaps, I need to believe we are tapping into the same human experience. One can appreciate beauty and craft despite this conclusion, noted, but at what point does this version of celebrated “insight” become numbing and bitter and isolating?  

None of which is neither here nor there: my words are not intended to (nor can) silence her or this story.

I see the power of one giving a telling of their insights. I see the need for her obvious demographic of readers to encounter her words, she can tell a layered story of women that they will listen to. And of TTW’s speaking to the layered ways women find their voice: through silence, through masks, through meditation, through reflection, through learning how to appreciate the waves of life, through the danger and beauty of being mothered and motherhood, through the watery streams of consciousness…

Of the many things I am, I am a lover of nature writing. Williams, Dillard and Silko being authors of some of my favorite memories. Nature writing is often a weaving of poetry, letters, essay, journalism, journalling, meditation, etc. How does one tell a story of their sense of self in the vastness of time and earth? What craft techniques translate the heart and mind onto the page? These are the questions that I have asked myself as I flip through my grandmother’s journals, as I fill journal after journal with private stories about where I am in time and earth and history. As I map and place my peoples, where do I exist? What craft element does TTW help us develop?

Voice.

Most fascinating to me, the structure of the piece as a showing of voice development and a showing of re-visitations to the themes of her life/art. 

No matter how I feel about the content of this book, I am moved by the ways in which Williams tackles just this, so deliberately/intentionally. Writers are asked all the time to tell us the secrets of finding their literary voice. Of course, the telling of that story is personal, it is often filled with stories of how we were voiceless or had to come to terms with the voicelessness of others (the silence of wives, the metaphors within her speech impediment, etc). Williams, then, does a lot of telling, but crafts a showing. 

Briefly, my favorite examples of her showing:

Chapter IV: Use of short sentences 

The structuring silence, secrets, restraint

The showing of that watery stream of consciousness. 

Page 21: “Between the silences, we played together.” 

Silence is the larger and what is then taught to her by her mother. 

Throughout: Poetry/quotes of greats

“The blackbird whistling 

Or just after”

- Wallace Stevens

My Mother’s Journals are “just after”

Giving meaning through these inserts, a certain depth to the meaning of these blank journals. 

Additionally, quotes are prompts to guide how to find voice, how tot see these blank journals, (favorite example on page 57). Thus, a showing of her variations on voice, her noted experimenting with voice (and not with dope or drinking, haha). 

In Lying, A Metaphorical Memoir, the author had a tendency to reiterate and the themes of her book as the lyrical gems move the piece and lulls the reader. So does TTW in When Women Were Birds. This creates a showing of her mind returning to obsession, to heartache, to the waves crashing into her, to her return to the profound sentiments in Refuge (119), and so on. It is a showing of complicated meanings of life and everything we encounter in it. Those blank journals cannot hold one meaning— they must be related to the grandmother’s field guides, to her youthful love of writing, the the underground living of women (92), to clipped wings and caged birds (147), to every story TTW will write in those journals and in her personal journals and that could have been written in them.