Journey Into the Past

This week I finished Natasha Trethewey's Pulitzer Prize winning memoir Memorial Drive, which chronicles the murder of her mother by her former stepfather when Trethewey was 19.

While it's description may appear very surface level true crime, this book is a powerful exploration of race, identity, voice, violence, dreams, trauma, guilt, and fate.

Much of the memoir explores memory and "the trick the mind plays in grappling to make meaning of events of the past, to find a narrative thread, to read - looking back - the signs we did not pay attention to in the moment."

As we plunge into the holiday season, whether we are returning to a place we once called home or simply reenacting a previous sense of home through holiday rituals, it can feel like the time between our present and past selves collapses.

Place is so much more to us than just a location or coordinates. When we willingly return to the places of our past, we are putting ourselves in the proximity of the events of our past. While we are literally living forward in time, certain places lead us backward into our past lives. Trethewey writes, "You can go a long time without making a full revolution, but memory is a loop."

And for so many us, we are lead "back to the scene of the trauma where the struggle must take place with the demon or angel who incarnates the mystery of violence and the mystery of rebirth and transformation," which Trethewey quotes from Gregory Orr's Poetry as Survival.

Going home or enacting the rituals of home is not simply a matter of travel or tradition. It is a journey back into the self, into the wounds and wonders of who we have been. I have made the mistake of thinking that time only marches forward. I thank Natasha Trethewey for reminding me that's it's an endless loop.

Purchase Memorial Drive here.