So back to writing. Let’s look at catharsis. I began writing
poems and stories at a young age. In Zimbabwe we had writing competitions that
were called, wait for it, given I now live in Wales: Eisteddfods! These must
have been instigated by Welsh pioneers (can I still use that word?). Through
these poems and stories I was able to exorcise the monsters of my imagination.
At other times I wrote poems about cats. Because, though I loved them, I was
allergic to them. Thus, in writing I got to excavate as well as celebrate.
It is the excavation I am going to dwell on here. As a young
child, I quite literally lived in my imagination. I was a solitary kid that did
not make friends until I was six, when Caroline from down the road became my
best friend. I grew up during the war for independence in Zimbabwe. There were
attacks by the ‘terrs’ – terrorists - bombs going off in the city and people
being shot away on the farms. Growing up in a fractured family where all sorts
of things were going on under the carpet, there was plenty of material to deal
with, and deal with it I did, through constructing imaginary worlds where the
monsters were dispelled. I devoured Enid Blyton books and then recreated the
narratives for myself and played them out in the trees in our garden. I often
recreated my own world, often imagining a place where adults did not exist. I
would imagine being rescued in a small sports car driven by Anthony Puffleadies
(that’s the phonetic spelling of the Greek name of a blonde, blue-eyed boy who
was to rescue me from the world I lived in and take me to another, more
civilised place ruled by small people; I was in KG2 at the time, as I recall).
Narratives: changing and constructing narratives began early
and have remained with me. As I grew up, the imaginings, poems and stories
developed into the keeping of journals where all sorts of thoughts and feelings
were worked out: a cathartic exercise I still engage in, thought the keeping of
a daily diary stopped when I began to write ‘seriously’ in my thirties and was
published for the first time – as a journalist, and later as an author. When I
became a Jesus believer in my early thirties, I began keeping prayer diaries,
in which I worked out what I believed and what I didn’t. I find that writing
literally helps me to work things out – out of my system. When I taught writing
to women that were in recovery, I taught them to write ‘unsent letters,’
letters to people that had hurt them that were burnt, ripped into small pieces
or screwed up and thrown into the waste paper bin. I practised this technique myself
– via email – but this is a dangerous practise on more than one occasion I have
accidentally sent them – usually to my mother. Stick to paper for this
technique.
All of these outlets help. I could not have got through my
life without the transforming power of my pen. I have ‘writed’ all sorts of
wrongs through my writing, from the personal (former family events that have
been painful) to the socio-political – in #AftertheRains. When I studied
psychoanalysis I discovered what I was doing with what mysteriously floated up
fro the depths to the surface of my imagination, was called ‘displacement.’
Placing people and events where I felt they belonged, can have the effect of
these events actually happened. Bonkers, but true. One can really write life ‘true,’
true for you: true, as things should be. Authentic writing always holds painful
truths in its fascinating amber.
