Stories and Forgiveness
With thanks to Ben Arthur
The talented songwriter Ben Arthur, a longtime friend of mine, hosts a podcast called SongWriter that I think many of you might find interesting and inspiring. Recently, Ben traveled to Rwanda and, in response to our Story Club discussion about the value of storytelling, wrote the following to me:
Wanted to respond to your call-out about storytelling, as I have been thinking about this A LOT. I was just in Rwanda for this grant I mentioned to you. Very intense, very surprising. And one of the things that kept hitting me is the way that storytelling, especially amongst our group/family, is a way of defining our selves, and defining the world as we understand it.
This becomes deeply important especially in things like forgiveness, which is of course a big issue in Rwanda. A scientist I interviewed, Dr. Pamela Wadende, explained that we need to tell the painful parts of our story to ourselves, repeatedly, before we are ready to tell it to other people. Then when we’re ready to share our stories, and when our community collectively engages with, and hears our story, this is how we make peace with even the hardest things we face.
Most fascinating to me was recalling that when I first started interviewing people who had lived through the genocide I was very, very anxious about asking them to relive painful parts of their past. I eventually realized this was a misunderstanding. As Dr. Wadende said to me (more or less): when a wound heals and becomes a scar you can touch it without pain; you may remember the pain you went through, but the wound has healed.
From the description of the episode:
“In this episode of SongWriter, Freddy Mutanguha describes surviving the Rwandan genocide. Thirty years later, Freddy is the CEO of the Aegis Trust, the organization that built the Kigali Genocide Memorial. Because of his work and his life story, Freddy is deeply engaged with the complicated issue of forgiveness. In the episode, he describes how he eventually decided to forgive the man who murdered his mother. Also, art activist Hope Azeda reads poems about talking to children about hard things, Dr. Pamela Wadende describes the complicated process of forgiveness, and Peace Jolis performs a song written in response called “BAHO” (Kinyarwanda for “Live”).”
Hope you enjoy the episode.
Also, here’s Dr. Wadende speaking about telling the hard stories of our lives, and here she talks about how as we tell our stories, pain scabs over and eventually heals (both Instagram links).
Would love to hear your thoughts on writing and forgiveness. How has writing a story opened up your heart in an area where it was once closed? Reading a story? How might that work, anyway?
I find myself thinking of the ways in which even an entirely made-up story opens us up to something like “forgiveness,” in that it gives us a temporary, sometimes mind-bending, respite from the prison of self.
Thoughts? Experiences?
On SongWriter, Ben sometimes collaborates with writers and other songwriters, to write songs based on stories. He’s honored me with this three times now:
Here’s the episode with Craig Finn (of The Hold Steady), working with “Sea Oak.”
And the episode with Amanda Shires, working with “Tenth of December.”
And Ben, working with The Semplica Girl Diaries
And here, Ben reworks some lyrics I wrote: Young Dead.
Hope you all are having a great week. I’m down in New Orleans (well, Slidell) as you read this, visiting my parents.
Sending much to you all and heartfelt gratitude for this community.
I can answer as a poet that often the forgiveness comes through the writing, unbidden. There is something about delving into one's memories with all their smoke and mirrors that changes a person. I began this poem thinking only of my father's selfishness, but it ended in a very different place. From the journal Plume :
Revisiting San Juan Capistrano
The place would have been a mess
with so many birds, but what I’ve kept
is my mother in her picture hat
like a halo, the newest baby on her hip.
And I’d swear to bougainvillea, tumbling
in pink torrents over walls halfway to ruin.
It turns out there isn’t a vault in the brain
where memories are preserved like relics;
they assemble afresh each time,
like swallows flocking
through shadow and sun. My father strides
forever ahead, flourishing
his cigar as he extols beauty and proportion.
But who’s to say he wasn’t kind?
That he didn’t sit beside me on the ride home
while I settled to sleep on his shoulder.
I'd been struggling for years to forgive my mom for not protecting me from my abusive father. While writing the section of my memoir about my own depression and inability to care for my kids during the worst of it, I was confronted with the fact that what, in my mom, I'd seen as a monumental parenting fail, was actually something she had absolutely no ability to do differently. This led to a new understanding, which is what I think forgiveness is.