A Writing Manifesto - Lance A. Twitchell

A ruler is slapped across the lips of a child, sending a hot taste of iron, of blood, in her mouth and that will become her hunger. This language shall be stripped and now her children’s wisdom will be born of ash. And now her grandchildren will be born with hunger. And now a step will be taken towards the inevitable absorption into this thing we call English.

Long ago in a boarding school, away from family and familiarity, stripped of culture and made to be absence of heritage, a young boy looked between the crack of the door into the dim orange light of the hallway and saw two hoofed legs. He ran. And now his children will no what it means to fear a death that is larger than the loss of one. And now his grandchildren will wake each day with shame as their village is plundered by a thoughtless mass.

Meanwhile, across the rivers, in the dusky evening a creature is throwing massive stones into the water, announcing the presence of the supernatural. His face is not visible, but everyone knows it is like sliced thick fatty skin, gilled brown and red films inside like the expanded gills of yellow eyed red snapper whose body has ballooned with the pressure of being taken from the bottom of the sea. This creature has yellow eyes, and teeth that look like they have been filed down with granite. He is wandering the world and will not stop.

He will not stop because we have told his story. The story gives birth to the things that need to survive. Not just the things that make us happy to be human, but the things that make us ashamed to be human. Does my DNA code match Sitting Bull? Adolf Hitler? Mahatma Ghandi? Jeffery Dahmer? Martha Stewart? What can be imagined that is worse or better than the actions of humans?

A story can give birth to a monster, can help that creature gain strength and haunt us with power. It can take a moment of ultimate humanity, like a brother who saves another from drowning, like a woman who turns her back on her shivering infant, like a man who stomps the head of his relative until the breath stops, like a woman who takes in children one after the other and teaches them that the world will always contain kindness for which there is simply not enough gratitude.

A man once told me he would watch all of his relatives run around and play as children. He would sit with his Uncle, who told him, I will tell you everything nephew, about where our people are from. This story would be broken up over the course of a youth spent learning how to listen and to retell. The Uncle would speak for hours on end, telling where the people came from and why. He would speak like this with great detail, of a time that had long since passed, generations washing over one another like steady waves. The next day the Uncle would sit the nephew down every day and say, “now, tell me everything I told you yesterday.” If the nephew had one part wrong, the Uncle would tell it again, exacting in all details. When the nephew had all the parts right, his Uncle would then move on the next portion.

What remains of a people? What is the purpose that we turn to these letters that, when arranged just right, instill emotions and memories of events that may or may not have happened or will happen. From days of quill and ink, from days of the wisdom that rides on an elder’s breath, from the days of a clacking typewriter, we now have forms and means that make the writing process as difficult as it has ever been. Format the page, fill the white space, find your voice, keep your tense, don’t lose your reader, operate within a set of rules that you can learn inside and out so you can make them your slave.

In every page there is a piece of intergenerational suffering. In my right elbow there is a nerve that has memorized the fact that some people believe one group is more human than the other. In my right shoulder there is ache for the time my Grandmother crumpled in her armchair, hearing the news that her only full brother had drowned mysteriously at sea. Something wrinkled my forehead and it smells of sorrow, and seeks to find all these moments of humor that connect like suns of a constellation that collectively draw the joy of overcoming every single thing that threatens to squash.

There is this fuckhead with bad teeth, who everyone says is so nice when he isn’t drinking. He has to remind me that I am different. He has to take the memory of my Grandfather’s funeral and taint it with racism. His words are foul with decades of alcohol and hatred. They will fall onto the floor and die of asphyxiation. There is a route, though, above his little motivations. There is a way to help all of those whose voices have been crushed to pebbles on the beaches. There is a way to breathe life into an old monster, and puzzle ourselves with the complexity of that which we must simultaneously love and push away. It is gaining strength because we are telling its story, and we will not, this time. forget.