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Volume 5, Number 1 - Fall 2006
Experts in Reality:
Participants Live the Stories We Read
by
Anndee Hochman
We sit here, ironing.
It is Thursday night at Interim House, and I have just finished reading Tillie Olsen’s story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” the sweet-and-sour meditation of a mother who fears she has neglected her oldest daughter. Now we lean over the text, pressing the heat of intellect and soul into the creases.
“How many of you had to live apart from your parents when you were kids—or have kids who are being cared for by someone else?” Every hand in the room rises. Except mine.
“This story reminds me of what I went through,” says Priscilla. “My mother sent me to my father’s, and he didn’t have no gas to cook with, and when she wanted me back, I didn’t want to go.”
“It sounds like the girl never got love,” adds Stephanie. “Her mother was just too busy, she had too much to do, and she loved the younger ones better.” Around the room, heads nod knowingly.
In the first months of my freshman year in college, I highlighted a copy of The Iliad, using a bright yellow marker to flag every reference to fire. Then I wrote a paper on Homer’s imagery of flame and heat. My teachers valued such approaches—dispassionate, critical, conversant in the language of literary craft. And—I can’t help it—I bring that expertise with me into every People & Stories session.
But once I am in the room, once we have read the story, I am no longer the expert. Compared to the women who sprawl or sit on the beat-up couches of Interim House, I am a naïf, shockingly insulated from life.
I have never, like the mother in “Spilled Salt,” by Barbara Neely, had a family member return from prison and struggled to decide whether I would be safe in his presence. I have never tried to steal a purse, nor had one snatched from me. I haven’t, like the adolescent narrator of Rosario Morales’s “The Day It Happened,” heard the sounds of domestic violence thumping through my ceiling at night.
I have not dropped out of school, like the protagonist of Bernard Malamud’s “A Summer’s reading,” nor punched a parent, as the narrator does in “The Shawl,” a haunting story by Louise Erdrich. I have not suffered the unimaginable loss of a child.
At Interim House, when we discuss drug abuse, addiction, the death of family members from street violence or the struggle to feed ten children on one welfare check, I am the one who listens while others talk. In the stories, participants see themselves and their lives, the people they have known. And the People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos model, unlike the conventional academy, values this knowledge and expertise, believes in it as a useful tool for understanding the text and each other.
One goal of People & Stories, and of the educational model popularized by Paolo Freire, is to force all readers to question the assumptions they carry. That includes me. It is easy for me to walk into a session, having read the story a dozen times, considered it, formulated questions about it, practically learned it by heart, and feel that I hold the key to unlocking the text.
On good nights, that key shifts from hand to hand, changing contour as it moves, opening doors that spur all of us to challenge what we think we know, reminding us that people are complicated and that there is no single way to read a story, or a life.
When I glimpse myself in the stories we read, it is a refracted vision, seen through a slant. I recognize an emotional truth—the pain passed down through generations, for instance—through a story that differs, in character and locale and plot, from my own. This is the gift of literature—to reach across differences and decades, to show you yourself in another’s face. In this way, reading is an act of imagination and empathy. I believe, as the Egyptian scholar Salma Jayyusi said, “If we read one another, perhaps we won’t kill one another.”
And perhaps, if we read stories that reflect and affirm our own experiences, we can stop killing ourselves, as well. At Interim House, we read ‘Thank You, M’am,” by Langston Hughes, in which a boy tries to steal an older woman’s purse. Instead of calling the police, she takes him home and offers him a life lesson that leaves him speechless with gratitude. One woman in the group described how, when she was tricking, a man would sometimes give her money and demand nothing in return, and how she never knew what to say.
Remembering this, tears came to her eyes. Perhaps her story had shed a little of its shame. Maybe she could now weave this memory into the fabric of a complicated life. She had become a storyteller, not just a listener, with a tale as compelling and insightful as anything Langston Hughes or Alice Walker or Sandra Cisneros has to say.
When I come to Interim House, I try to bring all of who I am: a mother, a Jew, a lesbian, a daughter, a college graduate, a Philadelphian, an only child raised middle-class in the 1960s. Every woman in the room has her own, equally layered, story. When People & Stories succeeds, it allows each of us to take a turn bringing everything we know to bear on the text. It lets each of us take a turn leading the way.
One night, we discuss “You Are What You Own,” by Alice Adams, the story of a woman who finds herself burdened by material things. I ask if anyone has ever been in love with an object. I am thinking of the husband in the story and his obsession with surfaces, the way he caresses the furniture instead of his wife.
Marjorie says, “My straight-shoot (needle). It was my best friend. I carried it everywhere. If I broke it, I had to get another. I based my whole life around it.” Again, heads nod vigorously.
We keep talking: the women tell me about addiction and homelessness, Christian faith and bad marriages, what it feels like to wake up clean morning after morning. We dig deeper into the story, reveal a little more of ourselves. After an hour and a half, it is time to leave. We say good night, we say, “Be careful out there,” and then we go back to our lives, full of all we know and don’t know, travelers with new tales to think about and new tales to tell.