Crutches in my life

I just had hip arthroscopy...torn cartilage, left hip..."mileage," said my orthopedic surgeon. What he didn't tell me is that I must be on crutches for 4 weeks! No weight on my left hip whatsoever. Nevermind that in trying to coordinate my movements and those of my new pair of crutches I have already fallen several times, and nevermind that I live in a home with stairs. I must remember to not step on my left foot, lean on my left leg, rest on my left knee. What a bitch. What a humbling experience. I have never before felt such empathy with another using crutches, a wheelchair, a cane. Every inconsequential step I take is now to be pondered logistically. I take many steps in my home in a 24 hour period, but never before did I realize how much these peripatetic movements cost. If I leave one thing in another room, to crutch back to retrieve it takes time and energy that wears me out too early in the day, too early for this overachiever.
My upper body strength is being sorely tested, I have aches and pains in the sides of my body that I forgot had muscles...my forearms and wrists wear out earlier in the day than I would like...arthritis in my right thumb pains me after a day of crutching around. After three days of this I threw the crutches angrily on the floor because no matter what I do they seem to fall down constantly...then picking them or anything up off the floor takes concentration and alertness. I tend to want to steady myself on my left foot and forget that I cannot.
My patience level is being tested in a way that raising teenagers never has (fortunately I have twentysomethings now out in the world on their own).
But excuse me for whining, I thought my crutches in life would merely be a bit more servings of wine than I should, or when I was a protesting hippy, too much weed, hash, LSD or whatever...now crutch takes on a resonance that enrages me. My inability to accept the fact that I am not perfect, I am not able to get everything done when I want, as I want, where I want. Sigh. Maybe I should just shut up.

Letters Between Us - my novel out in Fall 2008

Up-and-coming writer Laura Wells goes to a memorial service for her best friend from childhood, Katharine Taylor, whose body was found in a garbage dump near Santa Barbara, California. At the time, Laura has been living apart from her husband. After she obtains some boxes of her own correspondence with Katharine and entries from Katharine's diaries, Laura moves into a cottage on the beach and begins her long 27-year journey back in memory revealing unimaginable past secrets of both herself and Katharine. As a result, Laura discovers a Katharine she thought she knew and didn't. LETTERS BETWEEN US is a requiem to friendship and an homage of remembrance, loss and liberation.

Check out lindaraderoverman.com for more about my epistolary novel coming this fall.

Summer 2007 in Shanghai Teaching

Photograph above is of Master of Nets Garden in Suzhou, China and by traveling there, this doorway compelled me to pass through it so strongly as if the opportunity to enter an enchanted realm would never come again. I did not hesitate.

I spent a week at Shanghai Normal University this past June 2007. I taught two creative writing workshops using image texts to inspire and motivate the students into another kind of writing...and what I showed them was quite a new concept for them.

Teaching 30 graduate students and ...what I found among the students (all English majors) was a strong desire and motivation to learn American English, culture, jargon, idioms and to embrace new kinds of literature.

These students very much wanted also to understand and embrace critical theory. One of the grad students asked me to help her with researching Donald Barthleme...she was mispronouncing his name and was happy that I taught her the correct pronunciation, but the important thing was is that she knew of him and wanted to use him as one of her sources in her thesis.

I later sent her some articles I had found that she could not. The university library at SNU is NOT hooked up to the worldwide web ( I think all of you can understand why considering the intense level of censorship that exists in China)...their internet access is limited...but many of the students find places on campus where there is wireless and then go crazy surfing the web.

I do believe, as my colleague Bob Chianese says, that these students would soak up any lit crit that Bob and the rest of us can teach them. They still are sheltered from much of the global discourse that lit crit engenders within classroom discussion...so this a way to open that door for them. And I am encouraged that Bob can continue this process in the fall 2007 at SNU that you have all begun here at CSUN.

SNU students are very shy about speaking out in class. They are not taught to challenge a professor openly in the classroom either through query or anything else. It is simply not their protocol. What I witnessed and heard from my interaction with grad students (I did not necessarily interact with undergrad mind you) was you do not interrupt nor openly speak out during class time. It would be considered rude and impolite.

So understanding that about these students...they need encouragement from us to be individual thinkers and feel free to engage in discourse through our prompting of such behaviors. Overall these students are under intense pressure there at SNU, and those who come here even more so...their success reflects not just on them and their culture, but their families and the very towns and provinces they come from...some are extemely poor and are priviliged to be at SNU or any university. So their actions reflect their entire community...if they fail they fail their entire community, village, town, etc., and lose face. These are very serious consequences. So there is a lot more to consider here than just teaching literature as a new means of independent thought.

Writing is the Daughter of Memory

Telling un Cuento in Travel and Journal Writing -- Project Chiapas
Linda Rader Overman, California State University Northridge

Chiapas Journal of Memory-3.28.97

Sitting on top of El Templo de la Cruz among these Mayan ruins in Palenque, the oversized white, hand embroidered shirt I purchased from a Mayan woman a few days ago, wraps itself. over my breasts, into the crevices underneath. It sticks along the length of my spine and it remains moist from the screeching humidity of this place and I am not surprised. This is where I want to be. Sitting on these stone steps, shells of what once was, I feel a connection that transcends time, myself, what I might have been, what I was, or perhaps what I am now. Quizas. I find my own deepest creative feeling in this remote jungle is not only Woman going back through the ages, she is myself discovering my own inner worlds, where my present one seems so pathetically inadequate.

I look past the trapezoidal complex of El Palacio, covered with anthills of foreign tourists speaking French, Spanish, and German who climb these steps, snap photographs, gulp down bottled water, and wipe away the perspiration from their faces. I see into the distance beyond these thirty-seven acres cleared and accessible to visitors, beyond the green of the jungle, beyond the patches of farmland, beyond the sphere of the earth, and I comprehend just why the ancient rulers from this natural palisade believed they were all powerful. They must have felt as I do now, like I’m sitting on top of the world where no one can touch me.

If, as David Bartholomae states, "every time a student sits down to write for us, [she] has to invent the university for the occasion; the student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing ... that define the discourse of our community," (460) then I, too, had to appropriate a "specialized discourse" to make a variety of connections as the student and not the teacher on this trip to the far away place of Chiapas, Mexico. All of these connections became links to ancient stones of my past; to Spanish as a second language (when once it was my first); to Tzotzil, one of twelve Mayan dialects; to code switching between all of them. I had to learn to speak several languages by "assembling and mimicking… while finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history" and learning the protocols of another country within a country. That is the country of the Maya who co-exist problematically and sometimes violently with Ladinos (Mexicanos & Guatamalans who reject individually or through their cultural heritage, Indian values of Mayan origin). Coming from Los Angeles, where Mexicana/Chicana is synonymous with the label of a historically under represented group, in Chiapas, suddenly, I was a member of the historically oppressive group.

Ladinos historically have marginalized the Mayan Indians and continue to do so today. "¡Andale bruta! Que te pasa, correte y trae la seflora su toalla ahorita. ¡Estupida!" The few minutes I spent watching a young Mayan servant girl being given a tongue lashing by her Ladino employer, in the hotel I was staying at in San Cristobal, made me painfully aware of 500 years of oppression suffered by these Indians. It was something I did not want to face, did not want to remember. It was knowledge I had stuffed away inside of me and wanted no part of. But traveling and journal writing in Chiapas during an English class trip, in order to study Mayan literature in whatever form I chose to appropriate it from, forced me to confront another story, the discovery of my own cuento. I felt very much like the student who must move into "a specialized language . . . [speaking] with a impressive air of authority" (461), but struggling every step of the way in this university that was relentlessly present for me each of the ten days of my trip.

I hide from the others -- the group I came with, my classmates as I hide from the I tourists, hide from myself so that I may find her, me, this woman in her fourth decade who still seeks secrets, secrets the ancient Mayans knew and many of the Mayans of today still know. Secrets Rigoberta Menchu knows when she writes, "Nevertheless, I’m still keeping my Indian identity a secret. I’m still keeping what I think no one should know. Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many books they have, can find out all our secrets" (247).

Suddenly I hear the calling of birds, birds I do not know the names of. The music they sing is like nothing I have heard at home in any forest. At first I’m not sure if it's the birds or the howler monkeys, but they are not so very near. They are smart and stay away from the throngs of people that invade this place during Semana Santa. Foreigners, all of them, all of us, and all of me. Although I am the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of a Mestiza, I too am a foreigner in my own land. This country is some part of what I am, yet for so long I was not allowed to admit to my connections to it by a mother who wanted to protect me from suffering the racial epithets hurled at her during a painful adolescence. But now that disconnection is falling away and reconnections are merging in union with the rhythms of this rain forest, in the heat that thaws my memory and soaks my oversized white, hand embroidered shirt. Estoy empapada completamente, pero no me muevo, aqui me quedo.

Clearly I'm on a journey in time and space. Answering la llamada de la aventura, I travel, although I sit here on this age-old stone. I have not traveled nearly far enough, yet. I am compelled by the specter of my indigenous great-grandmother. She appears to me as a young black-haired beauty standing outside her hacienda in Puebla, staring toward the hills watching for her husband's return. She was barely sixteen when she married Antonio Morales. By the age of twenty-one she was dead, leaving three small children motherless. My grandmother, Maria, was only six years-old when calling for her mother one day, who had fallen ill, and was told by a servant "Esta muerta. "

I will never know what Petra Rios really looked like, nor did my mother, Enriqueta, her granddaughter. A lock of braided black hair is all that Maria had left of her mother. An atavistic memory. Now it is all I have of her to give to my own daughter Deva, whose name means nature spirit.

Petra calls out to my heart, which takes steps before the rest of me. I sit still and listen as her calling intermingles with each bird song, with each cascading waterfall, with each stone that speaks to me as it did to Rosario Castellanos in her poem "Silence Near An Ancient Stone": 7he fragments of a thousand ancient defeated gods/ seek and bind each other in my blood, straining to rebuild their statue. From their shattered mouths/ a song struggles to rise to mine" (81). My own words are not quite intact yet, not as the words of the speaker in this poem who states, Estoy aqui, sentada, con todas mis palabrasI como una cesta de fruta verde, intactas. . . " nor do they [my words] bare the fruit I am looking for. Mis palabras struggle, bodies breaking free beneath the stones of my ancestors, like Petra, and her mothers before her of whom I know so little.

Sleep comes and I try to shake it off. I lie down on the cold harshness of the stone steps. I stretch out my legs. My head rests on my backpack--Mosquitoes buzz around my ear. I wave them off. Half asleep I begin to see other sights and hear other sounds, still in the jungle but far away from here. I think about the women. All those women dressed in red and white huipiles and black cortes. "No nos olvidas," they cried and I can't. Displaced, homeless, and hungry refugees, their men in prison or murdered by their enemies, the Mexican government, the women keep reappearing, the whole group of thirty or was it fifty? They almost look as if they are wearing uniforms while sitting waiting, and watching our group of fifteen college students, as we climb out of the white Ford pickup truck. We are all so happy to unwedge ourselves from the mass of crowded bodies and backpacks crammed into the back. We never did learn whose truck it really was. Juan Diaz, our Tzotzil translator, in the municipality of El Bosque, said he had a truck to take us to Las Delicias about one hour away, but no chauffeur. Armando, one of our group answers, "Pues tenemos un grupo de chauffeurs aqui, senor, " Juan smiles. "Ah pues vamanos entonces." We arrive in Las Delicias, a small hamlet about an eight hour drive in the mountains northwest of San Cristobal on a mission to take testimony from this group of expulsados, kicked out of their village two weeks earlier, by La Seguridad Publica, the men in blue, the state police. Briefed by the Human Rights Center, back in San Cristobal, in proper protocol among the Maya, we bring nothing to offer these desplasados, as we must not single anyone out. If we don't have enough provisions for 60 families, then we must not cause divisiveness by favoring anyone with food, water or medicine. Something they have little of and need desperately. Something we have more of than we need.

We arrived at this refugee camp believing ourselves to be a group of intellectuals sent by California State University Northridge to do research and gather data for the term papers we were expected to write out of this experience. We were, in fact, more along the lines of organic intellectuals, similar to those defined by Edward Said as a "[group] of individuals ... aligned with [an institution] and [deriving] power and authority from [that institution]" (50). We were ready and felt ourselves to be completely prepared by the previous two months of study on the Mayan condition, and on the political upheaval from the Zapatista Revolution with its current tensions. We had our journals. We were armed and eager to write.

We soon discovered, however, that we were amateurs fitting Said's definition as those "with desire to he moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture" (57). The larger picture in this case was a starving, ill and displaced group of almost three hundred refugees. In this picture our group was clearly one of "apprentices rather than. . . teachers or scholars" (Bartholomae 462) in a university that privileges Tzotzil over Spanish, community over individuality, and men over women. We "were children" being offered the suffering and wisdom of the others' experience. We found a completely alien environment, a university that we had to invent and acclimate to; causing us to reinvent the discourse, and ourselves.

There are over a hundred people milling around between those of us in front of the main assembly building up on a little hill where we wait and the open area below us where the women wait. We are all waiting for something to happen. I watch the women who wait still, so many of them sitting together in orderly fashion like schoolgirls. The littler girls stay together, some by their mothers' side. Other little babies are in rebosos, which are slung around their mothers' shoulders, nursing, sleeping, clutching the warmth of the body that carries them. These females of all ages are so beautiful with their long hair in braids, as they stand and sway in a sea of red and white while the day's heat melts us all.

They move as if possessed by one body, one mind alone. And I move with them as Gloria Anzaldua writes, "continually [as I walk out of one culture into another" weaving the fabric of a canto constructed out of a cuento of my own-as these women have woven the very shirts that now cling to their breasts and the crevices underneath.

Works Cited

Bartholomae, David. "Inventing the University." Composition in Four Keys. Eds. Mark Wiley, Barbara Gleason, and Louise Weatherbee Phelps. Mountain View, California: Mayfield, 1996. 460-479.

Castenanos, Rosario. A Rosario Castellanos Reader. Ed. and trans. Maureen Ahern. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Menchu, Rigoberta. I Rigoberta Menchu. Ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Trans. Ann Wright. London: Verso, 1984.

Said, Edward. "Professionals and Amateurs." Representations of the Intellectuals. London: Vintage, 1994. 49-62

Reference Citation: Overman, L. (1998). "Telling un Cuento in Travel and Journal Writing—Project Chiapas." WILLA, Vol. VII, p. 20-22.

Find this article also at Willa Vol. 7 from The Women in Literacy and Life Assembly of The National Council of Teachers of English.

Letters Between Us sees the light of a published day!

After almost two years of sending out my novel and receiving the usual "interesting....but nevermind," or "good...but nevermind," or "we love your characters...but nevermind," or "we think it is poignant...but were not the agency for you try....nevermind," then finally editor, Susan Bright, from Plain View Press read it and got it (or as Jack Kerouac would have written "dug it"). At any rate Ms. Bright "got" the manuscript...she "got" the story. And she is publishing it later this year. God Bless that Texas gal!

Letters Between Us by yours truly Linda Rader Overman, will see the light of the printing press. It is a novel about a troubled writer's search to understand a friend's mysterious death at a mental institution leading to her own self-discovery and transformation.

And there will be more. . .yahoo!

A Desire to Write Transcends being Locked In

After viewing the incredible film The Diving Bell & The Butterfly and then reading the memoir of the same title, I wonder if I have anything to complain about...I mean really. Blinking out a memoir in 14 months one letter at a time with one eyelid?! Now that's a voice insisting to be heard and worthy of being listened to.

After teaching remedial writing this semester, I suggested my students all see the film, a testament to the victory of the human spirit and a profound commentary on the desire to write and be heard no matter what the cost.

By itself alone this story of Jean Dominique Bauby, (French) Elle's Editor in Chief, and quite the Bon Vivant
sharing his last words and reflections on his life should inspire all nascent writers to come forth and mark their place in history on paper, on a keyboard, on a blog or video but mark a place and share the story of their own lives, for themselves, for their children and grandchildren. I don't know if any of my students will see the film, many of the class members were born in 1988/1989 and the idea of writing in a journal with a regular old pen may seem archaic, but I did see one of my young female students showing off her vinyl bound journal the last day of class with white pages inside filled with her cursive and her life as she is living it now.

Our personal histories are so undervalued, but so important in the sum total of our lives. Even though we may just be ordinary and I am certainly first in line as an ordinary woman, but the students that I have the privilege of teaching will one day rule the world that I will be ageing (and hopefully sage-ing) in. It will be important for all of us in the years to come not to forget what we must remember and what books and films like that of Bauby's story demand we remember.

Family Pictures Shape Memory

An excerpt from my essay

"Family Pictures Shape Memory."

Chican@s in the Conversations
Eds. Elizabeth Rodriguez Kessler and Anne Perrin.
New York: Longman (2007).

Photographs of my intersection with self and history are images that have a profound impact on the way I remember my past. These images exist thankfully because of the photographs taken by my father (who made a career out of snapping the lives of others on film), and by photographers whose identities have long been erased from the memory of my family members: my elderly mother or my aunts and other uncles, repositories of my family history, some of whom are now frail, in their eighties, early nineties, or dead. Collected and stored by my mother--a woman who never throws anything away--thousands of pictures stuffed in albums, in envelopes, in dressers, and in boxes are now in my possession. The best I could gather over the past two decades line the walls of my home. These images of family members and friends, some long dead, some still alive, intrigue me. I wonder just who all these people and images I grew up with really were and what they were actually doing when the photographs were taken? Often there are no captions to inform the viewer of anything, so I wondered what had occurred just prior to the click of the shutter or just after. Why are the subjects in the snapshots positioned just so? What directions were the subjects receiving from the photographer? What responses were being directed back at the photographer? Were the subjects told to look just off-camera, put on lipstick, smooth a misplaced hair, or simply just told after a 1-2-3 count to “Smile? What did the photographs so masterfully composed not show or tell about the people or events captured? Was the attention centered on the picture=s real subject? What kind of statement was being made as a result? Was the photographer taking a kind of revenge on a particular subject or offering forgiveness?

During this looking and recalling, I had many discussions with my mother about the treasure trove of photographs she so lovingly and caringly saved along with her idealized and/or perceived memories. Mother's descriptions often suffered from an occasional fuzzy memory exacerbated by poor eyesight. It was then that I would discuss these photographs with aunts and uncles who often affirmed or contradicted Mother's (re)memories of the very same images. Within the contradictions misconceptions about memory arise, and although photographs evoke memories those memories do not simply spring out of the images themselves; they generate meaning-making, traces, suggestions of something else-disagreements within family culture.

Moreover, any references to my parent's ultimately unhappy marriage, lasting only eight years and ending in divorce, were also cause for conflicting narratives and, at times, distorting the topography of remembrance. Looking back on realities and ideals shared between us, fueled by countless 8x10 glossies, Mother (without realizing it) ended up assisting me in producing narrative complements or imagetexts, which allowed me to fill in what the pictures left out. . . . . . . .