NEW
Library Project
Volume 3, Number 2 - Spring 2005
Readers Discover Metaphors
of Transformation
by Anndee Hochman
Dawn felt convinced that I was pulling stories
from a special website: Literature for Women in Recovery. By the fifth
session of People and Stories at Interim House, a six-month intensive
program in Philadelphia for women recovering from drug and alcohol abuse,
she had found powerful, personal images of change in Toshio Mori’s
“Abalone, Abalone, Abalone,” Paul Milenski’s “Tickits” and
Langston Hughes’s “Thank You, M’am.”
In
“Abalone,” the story of an older gardener who gently helps a younger
man find beauty and solace through collecting abalone shells, Dawn pointed
to this evocative passage: “But on the other side, the inside of the
shell, the more I polished the more lustre I found…There were colors
which I had not seen in the abalone shells before or anywhere else.” She
cupped her hands in front of her. “See, you have this hard shell, and as
you recover, you start to come out of it. You become beautiful. You start
to like yourself.” Dawn slowly parted her palms. Linda, who usually
spiked our discussions with a joke or sly aside, nodded soberly. Clowning
was her shell, she said. “I’m starting to come out of it.”
Dawn
and Linda weren’t alone in believing the stories were mirrors, flashing
back the very message that they and others in the group needed to hear.
But the stories we read together were more than mere reflections. They
revealed life not only as it is but as it might be; they were not just
mirrors, but metaphors, glimpses of people, relationships and communities
in the process of becoming. As the women at Interim House learned to notice and
cherish metaphor, they were really learning about the possibility of
change.
We
read Chinua Achebe’s “Marriage is a Private Affair,” the story of a
man who disowns his son after learning that he has married a woman from
another tribe. The older man remains steadfast in his prejudice until the
story’s final scene, when he learns that he has two grandchildren who
want to see and know him. The man stands at his window and watches while
“…it began to rain, the first rain in the year. It came down in large
sharp drops and was accompanied by the lightning and thunder which mark a
change of season.” Nadira said the paragraph was more than a weather
report; it was a metaphor for the old man’s internal shift. “It is a change of season,” she said. “It’s a change of heart.”
“You
know, I think this story is really about fear of change,” said Dawn.
“And life changes. If we didn’t believe that, if we didn’t believe
people could change, we wouldn’t be here.”
After
reading Raymond Carver’s spare, enigmatic story, “Fat,” readers
argued about the nature of the transformation alluded to by the
protagonist, a waitress stuck in an unrewarding job with a selfish
boyfriend as her boss. Some believed the waitress was pregnant; others
were certain she had decided to leave her boyfriend. Dawn said she might
not take any action; what mattered was that the waitress now realized she
had choices. Why, I asked, does the story’s ending include the phrase,
“It is August”? Why not some other month? “August is a change of
season,” Nadira said. “Everything’s going to change, and so is
she.”
The
changes wrought by metaphor are not always visible: a subtle shift in
perception, the glimmer of a new possibility. Abalone shells transmute to
the emotional protections we all wear; a stormy sky becomes the inner
landscape of a troubled man. But on a few occasions, readers took literary
metaphors to heart—and to action.
At
Covenant House, a temporary shelter for young women in Germantown, we read
Alice Walker’s “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self.” Readers
were amazed to learn that Walker, an author they knew from reading or
seeing The Color Purple, had
been blinded in one eye during a childhood accident involving a BB gun. In
the story, Walker describes her shame about the scar on her eye—and how
that shame was transformed by her three-year-old daughter’s comment,
“Mommy, there’s a world in
your eye!” Iris read that passage and said, “Her daughter gave her
back the thing that had been taken away. She was whole again.”
But
in this case, insight wasn’t all. Turquoise announced that she thought
it was ridiculous for women to measure ourselves against impossible
standards of beauty; then, with a mischievous grin, she snatched off the
wig of shiny, straight black hair she always wore and flung it
triumphantly across the room. “Okay, this is me!” she said, tossing a
head of kinky curls. “Do you still love me?” The roomful of women
broke into applause,
Ursula
K. LeGuin’s poem, “Read at the Award Dinner, May 1996,” suggests
that art is dangerous because it can provoke not only individual change,
but social upheaval. “Beware when you honor an artist,” she writes.
“You are praising danger.” I read that poem at the start of one
Interim House session, before we delved into “Chin,” Gish Jen’s
story of witnessing and abuse, and asked what readers thought of the
notion that art can be hazardous to community norms.
Linda,
the former class clown, answered thoughtfully. “Yeah, art’s dangerous
because it can open doors and get people thinking; then they might get in
a rage and rise up.” At Covenant House, months later, Turquoise came to
the same conclusion after reading “The Shawl” by Louise Erdrich, about
the ways trauma trickles down from the past and can leave us paralyzed by
long-ago wounds. “Right around this table, I bet there are sorrows
passed through the generations. Love and hate. It’s all passed down.”
How do you break the cycle? “Someone has to take a stand. Someone has to
say, ‘This ain’t right,’ and do something different…something no
generation has tried before.”
Communal
change starts, I believe, with the unlocking of one mind. When we read
together, when we experience the shape-shifting nature of the world and
learn that truth wears many different clothes, when we truly listen to one
another’s words and stories, we create the possibility of large-scale
change. One reader’s private transformation may, once articulated,
ignite similar sparks in another, and another.
At
the close of the first Interim House series, we composed an impromptu oral
poem. The women chanted their own names, then their nicknames and the
names of their parents. Finally, they described themselves using a
metaphor. Linda said, “I am a peacock showing its feathers.” Paris
said, “I am a waterfall.” And Diane referred back to the shells in
“Abalone,” the crusty exteriors that, with work and dedication, can
yield amazing hues.
“When you come [to Interim House], you could be like a brick wall. But when you walk out, because you’re learning things, you’re like a flower.”