Walking the Wall

While watching the movie Spanglish tonight I was struck by what the
daughter wrote in her letter of application to Harvard, that she hoped
to be accepted into their college, but that she would not be defined by
whether she was or wasn’t–that who she was was wrapped only in her
mother–that the sense of womanhood that she had was passed down to her
from one strong woman to the next and she wouldn’t be defined outside
of that. It reminded me first of a poem by Lucille Clifton called
Daughters :

woman who shines at the head
of my grandmother’s bed,
brilliant woman, i like to think
you whispered into her ear
instructions. i like to think
you are the oddness in us,
you are the arrow
that pierced our plain skin
and made us fancy women;
my wild witch gran, my magic mama,
and even these gaudy girls.
i like to think you gave us
extraordinary power and to
protect us, you become the name
we were cautioned to forget.
it is enough,
you must have murmured,
to remember that i was
and that you are. woman, i am
lucille, which stands for light,
daughter of thelma, daughter
of georgia, daughter of
dazzling you.

This
reminded me of a response I had written to this poem a few years ago. I
wrote that I believe there is a need in people to step out of the
ordinariness of their everyday lives, and to have a piece of themselves
that is different…special…magical. There is something to be gained in
Lucille saying, this is my great-grandmother, “my wild witch gran, my
magic mama.” This part of who she is pulls her out of the mundane. This
piece of Lucille’s past makes life more tolerable—colors the past in a
coat of many colors rather than the drab, work brown of everyday. This
idea of personal myth runs through my thinking constantly because I
believe strongly that there exists in each one of us a strong personal
myth that works with and around the greater myths of society.

Lucille’s great grandmother was different, special, something apart
from average day life, and for that reason Lucille cherished the
connection. “I like to think you gave us/ extraordinary power,” she
wrote. Her grandmother gave her the power to step outside of life and
the power to tap into a mine, which obviously generated a large amount
of literary success. Heard in this poem is pride in the past, and in a
lineage she cherished—a touchstone of where she came from, which
affects her present, and influences her future. Eva Luna was the
daughter of a woman who ran free in the jungle of the Conquistador’s
dreams, and she was the daughter of a man who came from where the
hundred rivers met. This was her past, this was her personal myth which
lifted her out of ordinary joys and sorrows. Lucille, “which stands for
light”, was the daughter of Thelma, who was the daughter of Georgia,
who was the daughter of a witch who still stands over her
granddaughters bed and whispers to Lucille to remember who is she is.

We all have those pieces of myth in our family that somehow reach
out of the past and help to define us. Our mother’s stories, our
father’s stories, the stories of our own selves and the way that we
remember them that stands outside of remembering exactly how it
was–because how we remember it is part of how we define ourselves.