Thursday, October 8, 2009

My stories: Revisiting The Woman Warrior

When I was an undergrad, I read Maxine Hong Kingston's book The Woman Warrior as part of a creative writing class. It was a meaningful reading experience, and I kept the book.
Now, reading it again, I'm amused by the things I had underlined (and by my metallic gel pen phase). I was obviously reading from a word-use perspective, but I was also reading as a girl who was neck deep in a story about a woman warrior.

I was attempting my first rewrite of Armina's story at the time, and she was still a kick ass first, think about it later sort of gal. I honestly think it was in the reading of this book that Armina started her metamorphosis into something less sword-wielding and crazy.
Coming across my younger self in the pages of this book alone makes the reread worth it, but reading it now feels downright exultant to me. Reading this book is like building up buttresses around the walls of my personal cathedral.

The way MHK travels through Chinese legends as herself is a great reminder of how powerful story can be. I've been trying very hard to focus on my school work, not getting side-tracked into the land of my fictional characters, though my brain is firing at 90 miles an hour, and all this talk about myth makes me want to work on Rak and Dane...and all this talk about gods makes me want to work on Armina.

It's very hard not to cave because I haven't had the focus, or desire, to work on either since my life went wonky in June. I was just starting to get back on the train the week DB met Bosie. (ah ha. yes. so clever my literary history references.) Then, I couldn't even think about anything...much less a story where the female friend gets the hero...whose lovely, sad wife is conveniently disposed of in childbirth. I thought about rearranging my favorite love story because of real life...VILE.

This is the power of story...both the story I was living, and the stories I have been telling.
If stories can hurt (and I'm choosing to treat my perceptions/DB's actual behavior as a form of story), stories can heal as well.
I recently wrote a paper for class about my connection to Wendy Darling in Peter Pan. I found that I was really angry about the way this story had been co-opted by DB and Bosie, so I wrote about redefining my relationship to Wendy Darling. It is time to do that with my own stories as well. I won't allow myself to hate characters that are parts of myself.

Armina and Justin, close friends of the opposite sex or not, are not representations of that other life story, and they predate it by years! (Though I can't say I won't include some of what I've learned this last summer in adding poignancy to the relationship between Justin, Anne and Armina.) I will not allow my annoyance with Bosie's one track mind to cloud the way I write Dane's ambiguous sexuality. That was in the works long before I knew she existed.

Growing up, I was able to use fiction as a means of channeling the things that were bothering me, and somewhere along the line (perhaps in believing I could do this for money), I blocked up that flow. I'm hoping that having a career path that is not entirely dependent on fiction writing will open this up for me again. There is so much wealth in the upside down world.

And there are many other stories it is time for me to take back and make my own again. I think that was the pull and giddiness I was feeling as I was reading Maxine Hong Kingston retell the Fa Mu Lan story with herself at its center. Of course, some of that was still the idea of myself as swordswoman: years of training on the dragon mountain, gaining the skills to return and take her father's place in the army. Riding out with revenge characters carved into her back, gathering armies, being undiminished by marriage and a child, coming home in triumph to live in peace.


P.S. I have chills that "Muhammad My Friend" was playing on itunes as I completed this: "We both know it was a girl/back in Bethlehem."

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