A Purple Crayon

She’s six years old, doesn’t speak English, and is a primary witness against her father.

Her mother helps her find what she’s looking for in a tub of blunt crayons.  Without a shared tongue, I’m not so much rejected as invisible.  On a practical level, I need to bond with this child so the court system won’t rip her heart out.

But the interpreter hasn’t come, the girl keeps colouring.  That’s all I’ve got to work with.

The second time she asks her mother, I understand their word for purple.  The third time she says it, I hand the purple crayon to her.  Everything changes, the door opens and I walk in as an old friend.  Until that purple crayon, the little girl lived in a world where few people heard her.

When I was about her age, I had other things on my mind.  It pissed me off that people had private thoughts and I couldn’t access them.  While little-girl-me didn’t put our family dachshund on the couch and ask in a breathy voice, ‘How does that make you feel?’, I eventually became a trauma therapist.

Trauma does a lot of things to a person, aided and abetted by the traumatic memory being stored outside the brain’s language centre.

In response, trauma clients often generate powerful metaphors, symbols that escape the limitation of words.  These metaphors open me, as the listener, to the emotional connectedness of the human experience.  And isn’t that the very thing writers search for?

I don’t know if it’s my years as a trauma therapist or because I’m a middle child or an immigrant or a woman, but my writing is awash with that connectedness, but as the recipient rather than the person generating connection. 

Nearly every fictional room I construct is filled with a cast of not-me’s enacting someone else’s story.  My personal experiences are there, because we never escape our own truth totally, but unobtrusively there, off to one side, perhaps on a top bookshelf or in the pattern of the yellow purple wallpaper.

There’s no reason for this.  The times I’ve slashed my own crayon across the greybrown wall of my life, people have been marvellous, as people generally are when we try.  Whatever the initial cause, it’s extremely difficult for me to write about my personal experiences.  To create this blog, for instance, I’ve spent two weeks unwittingly digressing then deleting, then starting all over again with someone else’s story after all.

I have an instinct for making myself invisible, even to myself – when I actively look for my story, I can’t see it.  I’ve become a negative hallucination, something that is there but the mind chooses not to acknowledge.

I first realised this when I took a documentary film course with Tina Gharavi (I am Nasrine).  Tina asked us to list significant life events, with the expectation that the list would generate ideas for our three minute autobiography.  Easy enough.  We all know our special moments.  Except on my list, there were no instances when I was the main character.  No first kiss, graduation, wedding day.  Instead, my most important memories were when I’d supported someone else. 

Tina then wanted to know the theme in our list.  My God, I thought as I waited for her to call on me, I’m No One.  I have no autobiography.  My film will be three minutes of empty space.  But another part of my brain said, I am a witness.

I thought (perhaps in a fit of sexism), this is what women do.  We witness.  I don’t mean that we stand by and wring our hands while something manly happens.  I mean that we witness in an active way.  We hand over a purple crayon and allow others to be.

I took Witness as my theme, wrapped around the story of how I supported my sister through her husband’s death.  When recruiting women to participate in the film, I shared my definition of witnessing with each of them.  In turn, the woman looked away.  I’d wait.  She’d begin to give witness, exactly as I imagined it.  In the final edit, Laura Emerson (Backscratch Theatre) sung my witness, while other women sang, danced, repeated their witness.  An autobiography with a cast of twenty.

I don’t live my life as a shrinking violet, though.  I’m just as likely to sing with the music in a lift or dance to the busker in the street, as I am to sit quietly in Durham Cathedral and wonder where a door three stories up would take me.  When I needed references from my undergraduate tutors, they remembered me excruciatingly well after 27 years.  Yet, I’m such a purloined letter in my own writing that I’ve been stuck for three days inside this very paragraph, unable to conclude anything from what I’ve spent a fortnight trying to say.

So I look for my truth in the purple yellow wallpaper.  Where am I hiding in these 900 or so words?  Witness, family dog, blah blah blah, purple crayon.  There it is.  Every version of this essay includes the girl with the purple crayon.  My instruction to self:  Learn my word for purple, give myself that crayon, become the primary witness, generate my own connectedness.

Thirty years as a trauma therapist, and I’m only now beginning to figure things out.

Category: Contemporary Women Writers