Your Precious Voice

"You try to make something from catastrophe and loss, a monument of words. You memorialize your subject, and in the process you memorialize the act of writing and understanding. Then if you're good enough, and lucky, you might stamp on the world a small thing that can remind you and others of the delicate fact of existence, and why we hold it so dearly."

- Johns Hopkins writing professor Bill Loizeaux quoting his professor, Frederick Busch (from http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/11/16/precious-a-movie-that-cracks-open-your-heart/)

Over the weekend a friend and I went to see the movie Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (www.weareallprecious.com) - leaving us emotionally bankrupt and shaken but profoundly grateful to have seen the film. The magnificent acting and storytelling gave us reason to feel gratitude despite the soul-shattering violence and trauma that Precious undergoes in 1987 Harlem. Leaving aside the major themes of violence, racism, incest and systemic injustice, one thing in particular stuck with us: Precious' teacher urging her students to write. When Precious breaks down (the only time in the film) in her alternative-education classroom, all her teacher says to her (can say?) after hearing the tale of horrific abuse is "write, just write."

Precious does write - slowly and painfully mastering the letters of the alphabet at age 16 - putting down her fears and concerns and personal history in a $1.89 journal that you can pick up at any grocery or drug store. Yet these simple journals work magic on the students, their blank pages providing fuel for ambitions, room to grieve and protest, space to grow. As the students learn the basics of grammar, reading and writing they also learn something more important - they have a voice and someone is interested. I love the quote at the top of this entry because it expresses what the gift of writing can mean; through our stories we can remind each other both of life's fragility and pain, but also of its power and beauty and originality. This comprehension binds us together as shipmates on a strange voyage.

We are a species that relies on stories to give meaning to the roller-coaster joys and sorrow of life. Memorization and verbal oration of the Quran was the only way that these holy words were passed down before scribes began to write them (In the Land of Invisible Women, Qanta A. Ahmed, MD). The Bible's authors relied on oral traditions and aboriginal cultures still rely on storytelling to explain the origins of earth, of the origin of men and women, and why bad things happen in our lives. Live theatre, music, movies all serve to tell our stories, reprising the grand old themes of love, loss, longing, joy, in new ways that fit our times and places. Without the ability to tell, sing, write or act out stories something potent and beautiful would be lost.

Precious virtually gives birth to the self she imagines in her head through the power of writing down her hopes and ideas. The life she led, the novel it generated, and the movie based on the novel has now reached millions of people and made an impact the size of which no one can truly know. Not every story will reach out in the same way, with the same magnitude, but each story will ripple out and affect those who hear it, if we have the courage to write them down, act them or sing them out loud.