Myriam J.A. Chancy on Writing as an Act of Conjuring

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For me, so much of writing is about listening: listening to the sound of cars whizzing by on my street, to the faraway sounds of movement on the highway that I can sometimes just tune out and liken to ocean waves. It’s wishful thinking, I know, but my mind is playful, and pliable, and I wouldn’t want it to imagine otherwise the fumes, the wear and tear, the collisions that may be occurring at the very same time that I sit quietly, here, in my backyard, surrounded by teeming life: the neighbor who has just come home from work and I imagine by the sound of an alarm signal ringing out in the wind, fobbed her car to locked, in anticipation of robbers that never come, but could, while an eager dog welcomes another neighbor to my right, and all around me, birds sing out. They might be blue jays or buntings, doves, and the soft wind that lifts the leaves of palm trees like fingers through so much disheveled hair. Beyond, a plane flies overhead, destination unknown.

So much of writing is about listening.

It begins when my mind quiets and I can hear clearly the voices of the characters whose story I’ve been tasked to shape. Who is tasking me beyond myself, I cannot say, but I know it is time to return to the desk when they come, usually in the middle of the night, as I drift off to sleep, or from within the contours of a dream, or as I wake. They appear in that liminal space in which one sheds knowledge of self to move into another realm no one, not even ourselves, truly knows.

In that space, the voices—like the birds in my backyard—come to visit, and some become clearer than others, ready to be captured, as one does a photograph of a person, object, event. One attempts to inhabit that moment with all the senses, not only to feel the voice but to feel as it feels, hear as it hears, sees.

What do you see when you close your eyes? What do you imagine is there, hidden from sight, for another, looking in? What do you hear as you turn inwards? There is the thumping of your own heart, the swish of blood coursing through your circuitry of veins, the slow movement of eyes in their sockets as eyelids flutter close. Looking inward, listening inward, as close as you are to yourself, you can then make the leap to imagining yourself in another’s skin, another circuit board, inner workings.

Everything shifts: the quality of light, the room one is standing in, the texture of the surfaces, the tactility of objects and which of them matters for that voice, in their time, their caring.

The act of conjuring another might be like assuming a role, I think, as I watch Sophie Okonedo assume that of therapist, Angela Bowden, herself a therapist to therapists, in the series Wanderlust (UK, 2018). In the fifth episode of the series, Okonedo assumes center stage opposite Toni Collette’s Joy Richards, in a one-on-one scripted session. As Okonedo delivers her lines, repeating what she has heard her client say about her own life, we witness Okonedo transformed into Bowden, a Black female therapist to a white woman who assumes many privileges. Whether the role was written with Okonedo in mind or not, her body language, the minute gestures of the character, the way she measures her speech, reveals everything the audience needs to know about navigating race and power in narrow relation.

In a recent Guardian interview, when asked about her process, Okonedo says, “[f]or me, the thorough investigation of lines is how to access what I’m doing.” So too does the writer need to thoroughly access the line, how the characters deliver their pronouncements, and why, what gestures accompany them, how they move, physically and psychically through the world.

The voices declare where they have been and where they want to go. They are the true architects of the stories they inhabit.

Translating the voice of characters to the page is about listening to pitch and intonation, like one listens to birds, how one observes their movements in space: the cooing of mourning doves, the deep throated cackling of crows speaking to one another from the high branches of fir trees or atop power lines, the resolved moan of peacocks when captive, the staccato trill of red-throated robins, the high-pitched whistle of blue buntings as they fly like arrows through brush. Human beings too make themselves known through their tones, gestures, movements.

If you have been to a funeral, a wake, observed others there, their grief, gotten out of your own, as do the characters in Maryse Condé’s Crossing the Mangrove, attending Francis Sancher’s wake, who may or may not be telling his/their story, then you know what it means to listen with both the ear and the eye. For each of Condé’s characters, Sancher is a different man, by turn a scoundrel and a benefactor, a miscreant and a saint, a father but a child. Each of the characters tell their story of Sancher in their own way. Condé privileges the women with the authority of their first-person voices. “I,” she writes. I. I. I. The men, for the most part, speak in third person, limited voices. Each voice is unlike the rest. Only one repeats, as if to say, “I will survive this history,” while Sancher echoes from the grave, “History is my nightmare.”

When history is a nightmare, all one can do is circumvent it, write another version, a fiction. This is what literature is for: rewriting, revising.

First, there is the listening, then there is the rewriting as one writes the voices one hears, to better render their cadences, their rhythms, their visions. They speak, I listen. Some want to be known and speak in first person; others recede into disillusion, search for their becoming, or do not know their own minds. Such voices present themselves in third person, with just enough distance by which to reveal inadequacies and uncertainties, with just enough space to be themselves without complete surrender.

The voices declare where they have been and where they want to go. They are the true architects of the stories they inhabit. If their stories are paths, then the novels within which they breathe life are houses, each room belonging to a distinct character who embellishes it.

The characters decide where and how they live together in this house, trying to bend its form to their will, their vision of things, but it is no easy task to transform a house that has been standing for hundreds of years. Renovation sometimes falls flat or isn’t readily recognizable. But, like all things, even houses can be transformed into structures for new imaginings, as when Jean Rhys decides in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to free Bertha Mason Rochester from Charlotte Brontë’s attic in Jane Eyre (1847), to give Bertha a story of her own, more than a room. She frees her into the world even if she ends no better than in Brontë’s imaginings, no better than by fire. Still, Rhys gives Bertha an entire novel in which to roam and a seemingly ordered world is turned on its head: this is what the novel form can yield, if we desire to hear other stories. To accommodate them, the form must also be altered.

The novel, like the writer, can speak in many tongues, be broken into parts, accommodate dream sequences like reflections of real life. All that matters is that the voices ring as true as the birds in the wild, as long as the writing tells a true story, even when it lies.

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