Esther: Pt. 1

Photo by Charlie Harutaka on Unsplash

1.

Stories started appearing to me fully formed a year ago. This was not like any other writing that I’d experienced. While I’ve had the experience of having a story or poem drop onto the page as though it fell out of the sky like a cosmic gift, they were first drafts. They, like any other hard-won piece of writing, underwent shaping, drafting, massaging and revision. I could—and did/do—manipulate characters and plot lines like a master puppeteer.

These stories are feral and wild. They don’t just resist shaping and manipulation; they guard against it with teeth and claws bared. They show up with warnings and conditions. They are not interested in my opinion or my expertise. They want to take command, to wrestle the steering wheel from me and fully drive the car. I’ve agreed to share the driver’s seat, to relinquish some control. I think my duty is to share these stories with as much fire in my eyes as they have, to negotiate the words and descriptions with them, just like a good editor would, but to relinquish my creative license to them.

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The storytellers have taken drastic measures to get my attention.

This all started with Resmaa Manakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands. He suggests that in order for white people to truly make strides in becoming antiracist, we have to get acquainted with our own ancestral trauma; we must meet the ways in which we endured and inflicted pain in generations past to see the repercussions on our current status¹ . He shares a short meditation in which the reader opens themselves up to meeting an ancestor. Don’t worry if it takes a few tries for an ancestor to come forward, he says. Stay open and eventually one will appear.

Good student that I am, I made my way to my meditation cushion, set my timer for the suggested 10 minutes and closed my eyes. In a matter of seconds, there she was, my foremother, a bedraggled, curly haired maiden with goats and a small farm. A scene began unfolding before me like a movie.