On Metaphor
“Metaphor isn’t just for the rich or the well educated. My father could speak in metaphors 10 times as powerful as all of ours.”
I don’t remember the person to whom this comment was directed, or even the topic of discussion. But I do remember the setting—15 or so graduate students sitting in a circle, silent now, deathly silent. It was Tempe, Arizona, the mid-90s, and it was, as always, hot. Even in the institutional, air-conditioned rooms of the Humanities building, it always felt hot—the electricity of our creative minds conjoining, all of us wanting so badly to prove how smart and unique and creative we were, or to write the best pieces we could write, or both.
We were, actually, a relatively diverse group—black, brown, and white, queer and straight, American-born and not, working class and not, a variety of ages, from just-out-of-college to mid-40s—with a range of first languages and home states and countries. And yet something that someone in the room had said—something I can’t now remember—cut deep, so that what felt like centuries of anger welled up inside me, overflowing like…
Like what?
I also remember that at this particular point in graduate school, I had writer’s block, a terrible bout that I was worried would never end. There would go my master’s degree, my career. And my father would be right: this whole graduate school thing was a mistake. I could have made money as a doctor, or even a journalist, but this?
Like…my mind kept grasping for something, anything…overflowing like a river, a waterfall, a hot spring, a volcano.
Dull. All of these metaphors, dull. So dull that even the anger dulled as I tried to name it, to form it into language.
Here is what I was really saying that day: if I could go back to my working class, immigrant-parent self, the mythical self I liked to believe was really me, then I would be able to write again. It wouldn’t feel so hard. I would connect again to the deep, spiritual forces of my ancestors, the forces I’d felt so many times before, the forces that had definitely led me to become a writer.
But as a kid, I was actually privileged, living in a giant house on a giant, three acre piece of land in a suburb so rich that its name was uttered by anyone who didn’t live there in a British accent, because—well, because working class people assume use a British accent to designate that which is snobby, and pretentious.
I hated living in that rural-area-turning-suburban-before-my-eyes, although the land itself, and the subsequent, gradual loss of the rural markers in the landscape, taught me to love the natural world and to hate its misuse, lessons that continue to feed my writing and my social justice work. I hated being associated with that mock-British-accent name.
I longed to be like my parents, my jumped-ship, dark-skinned father, my mother who didn’t always have shoes but “always had plenty to eat, good food, too, because that’s what mattered to us.” I wanted to be, in short, the person they were trying so very hard to ensure I would not become.
I knew even then that a lot of what we had was a sham. We couldn’t always pay the bills. My father’s small business depended on Greeks getting seats on Akron’s City Council or other positions of power. We were one city council member or one or two or maybe three doctor’s bills away from losing the house. I knew even though nobody ever said so, and even though, when it finally happened, I was out of high school, out of college, out of graduate school, working my first “real” academic job.
But, even then, as when I had been a child, there was very little I could do. I felt the same helplessness I’d feel when a bill collector would call when I was 10 or 12 or 17. I could do nothing but help my father pack up his belongings and move.
In short, was always both ashamed of what we had and terrified of losing everything. The fact that I felt that way—both ashamed of where I lived, and worried about how much of a sham it was—was a personal failure, I reasoned.
“That isn’t what he was saying at all,” the only black woman in my class said, snapping me back into that air conditioned room.
“You weren’t listening.”
“I agree,” said a pretentious white woman. “You weren’t listening at all.”
The truth was, I was listening, hard, but not to what anyone was saying. I was listening, instead, as I always had, to what no one was saying, to the ellipses, the blank spaces on a page I hadn’t written yet.
Because I couldn’t find the words. Because, maybe, there were no words.
I was listening to the fear in the room—the histories that we either weren’t claiming or that we were claiming only because it was finally acceptable, even honorable, to do so—if we did so in an acceptable way. The anger had to be aimed at the right people. There had to be a little humor mixed in somewhere. We had to call for revolution even if we were just sitting around in a little circle talking about how to get our poems published day in and day out.
In short, we had to claim our history in a way that was not demeaning to us, our families, or “our people.”
“I hate that phrase, ‘my people,’” a Jewish woman said once, in the same workshop, about something I’d written. “It tells us so little. It tells us nothing, really.”
“Your people originated that phrase,” I shot back at her. There was a horrified silence--but to her credit, she laughed.
“That doesn’t mean it’s any good,” she said back, not the least bit angry, as if she’d heard it before, as if it was perfectly acceptable to call her out on her Jewishness, or lack thereof.
I wanted so badly to claim my people that I couldn’t claim them. I wanted to claim them to prove I’d never been ashamed. I wanted…
I wanted to tell the truth, but I wasn’t sure what it was anymore.
“What I get from this poem is how brave your mother was,” one of my friends said when we met, as we often did, at a coffee shop to look over new poems. “How incredibly and undeniably brave. I wish I could write about a mother like that.”
I had to call her brave. To say my mother was terrified, all the time, would have been demeaning. It would have been only half the truth, just as saying she was brave was only have the truth.
She was so brave in so many ways, ways I’ve explored throughout my work, ways that really matter. But she was also bound up in a deep fear of some unnamable danger. She was scared to let us ride our bikes on the road, to sleep over at somebody’s house, to eat the wrong foods, to...
The world outside those three acres, outside the tight-knit Greek community that, let’s face it, wasn’t anywhere near us, geographically, was safe. The only safe “place.”
“Have you ever been to a sleepover?” a blond girl asked me in the fourth grade on our way out to recess.
I knew what this was about: I’d told my best friend, privately, that my mom wouldn’t let me go to sleepovers.
But the truth was that just that weekend I’d slept over at my friend Stephanie’s. But somehow, in my mind, that didn’t count. She was a Greek girl, an Ikarian girl, which meant her parents knew my parents, her grandparents knew my grandparents, we had been to each other’s hometowns—the ones in Greece, of course, not the false ones here in the states—and so, we weren’t friends. We were something stronger than friends, sisters, cousins, whatever.
“Have you?” the blond girl pressed. I heard three other girls behind her giggling, but I couldn’t look up at them. I had always hated all four of these girls. I couldn’t believe my best friend had told them.
“Yes,” I said, confidently. “I slept over at my friend Stephanie’s two nights ago.”
“Stephanie? Who’s that?”
“She goes to my church,” I said.
They giggled some more. “Right. Stephanie. She goes to your weird Zeus-worshiping church.”
More laughter.
“We don’t worship Zeus anymore,” I said.
“Anymore,” one of them said, and they looked at each other, a knowing look, and started laughing all over again.
This was supposed to be about metaphor. It was going to be, actually, a blog entry about how I wanted so badly to explain to my students today that seeing metaphors in the world, that recognizing them suddenly or after a great deal of rewriting, was, maybe, the best reward of being a writer. That being able to connect one thing to another—to actually conjure a sensory and a spiritual and a rational connection all at once, and then translate it into words—was the most important work a writer could do.
I wanted to call up that quote from Adrienne Rich from 2001 in which she reminds us that we will be saved by metaphors alone—that we must resist language that manipulates and shames, language that stays on the surface, if we hope ever to overcome polarizing divisions. Only I couldn’t remember the quote, or even the gist of it, not while I was in class.
I was unnerved by the two international students who kept raising their hands to ask about the homework, the native American girl who whispered, “Are we going to do this for the whole hour?”, who I snapped at, who told me, later, that she felt really sick and just wanted to know what she would miss if she left class. I was unnerved, too, by the boy who couldn’t stop talking and the girl who got red when we read an excerpt from a story with sexual content and the fact that no matter how many times I tell them to slow down, to just listen to each other, they can’t. They’re too busy trying to be smart, just as I was in graduate school and wished I could have been at their age.
I was unnerved because I wasn’t sure I could teach them anything that mattered.
I was unnerved, too, by the thickly falling snow and the fact that soon, I would be driving my daughter to an appointment an hour and a half away, and I didn’t want to do it. I have been inexplicably gripped by fear whenever I’m behind a wheel lately, not just in the snow. This is marginally due to the fact that my cousin died in a freak accident a year ago, that I’ve had a few near misses since then, but—but it feels bigger than that. Almost genetic.
I keep thinking about my mother, who appeared so calm and brave but hated it when we would go out on the road on our bikes.
Terrified. So terrified that…
That what? That we weren’t allowed to ride our bikes? To go to sleep overs? So what?
After my class, my daughter and I set out, as we do every other week, only this time T was working and so it was just the two of us, which meant I had to drive. I soon realized, after the second semi passed me, after the third time we dipped into a tiny, fogged-over valley and couldn’t see more than two feet in front of us, after the fourth time my tire slipped a little, and I imagined myself and my daughter stranded in a ditch on a ferociously cold day, unable to get help, freezing to death, well…
I turned around.
“I was feeling a little nervous all along,” S said. “I just didn’t want to tell you, because I could tell you were already nervous.”
And so we went out to eat, because we’d planned to do so, as usual, after her appointment. Over supper, she confessed, “I think I’m afraid of everything. My fear is like…like a tornado. I’m in the eye, but it’s swirling all around me, and if…”
She stopped, looked at me to check my understanding.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. If you step into the wind…”
“I’m afraid I’m going to die,” she said more bluntly. “That something really bad could happen, and then I would be dead.”
“What else are you afraid of?”
“Getting older. More responsibility. You and T breaking up. Losing you. Losing T. Saying or doing the wrong thing so one of you gives up on me. Being in a car with you driving.” At that, she smiled a little, relaxed. “But right now I’m just hungry. I wish they would bring us some bread.”
“Do you know what I do when I’m afraid?” I asked. “I try to figure out what I can control, and what I can’t. And what I can’t control, I try to let go of. And what I can control, I make a plan to do my best to control that part of things, and then try to move on.”
“Like if the roads are slippery, go slower.”
“Yes. But you can’t do anything about the other cars.”
“So don’t pay attention to them?” she asked.
“Well, not exactly. Just try…try not to step into the twirling wind of the tornado if you don’t have to. Or else break through it really really fast, so you’re on the outside. And then you can see the tornado’s moving away from you, or at least standing still, and it’s not so scary.”
“And what if it turns around and starts coming back the other way?”
“That’s when you run,” I said, and we laughed, and our food came, and we were warm and full and together.
“I know you love me,” she said, in between bites, “and that T loves me.” And she said it as if it were definitely enough, as if any betrayal or horror she might endure later would be manageable as long as we loved each other, and I realized how right she was.
I don’t remember the person to whom this comment was directed, or even the topic of discussion. But I do remember the setting—15 or so graduate students sitting in a circle, silent now, deathly silent. It was Tempe, Arizona, the mid-90s, and it was, as always, hot. Even in the institutional, air-conditioned rooms of the Humanities building, it always felt hot—the electricity of our creative minds conjoining, all of us wanting so badly to prove how smart and unique and creative we were, or to write the best pieces we could write, or both.
We were, actually, a relatively diverse group—black, brown, and white, queer and straight, American-born and not, working class and not, a variety of ages, from just-out-of-college to mid-40s—with a range of first languages and home states and countries. And yet something that someone in the room had said—something I can’t now remember—cut deep, so that what felt like centuries of anger welled up inside me, overflowing like…
Like what?
I also remember that at this particular point in graduate school, I had writer’s block, a terrible bout that I was worried would never end. There would go my master’s degree, my career. And my father would be right: this whole graduate school thing was a mistake. I could have made money as a doctor, or even a journalist, but this?
Like…my mind kept grasping for something, anything…overflowing like a river, a waterfall, a hot spring, a volcano.
Dull. All of these metaphors, dull. So dull that even the anger dulled as I tried to name it, to form it into language.
Here is what I was really saying that day: if I could go back to my working class, immigrant-parent self, the mythical self I liked to believe was really me, then I would be able to write again. It wouldn’t feel so hard. I would connect again to the deep, spiritual forces of my ancestors, the forces I’d felt so many times before, the forces that had definitely led me to become a writer.
But as a kid, I was actually privileged, living in a giant house on a giant, three acre piece of land in a suburb so rich that its name was uttered by anyone who didn’t live there in a British accent, because—well, because working class people assume use a British accent to designate that which is snobby, and pretentious.
I hated living in that rural-area-turning-suburban-before-my-eyes, although the land itself, and the subsequent, gradual loss of the rural markers in the landscape, taught me to love the natural world and to hate its misuse, lessons that continue to feed my writing and my social justice work. I hated being associated with that mock-British-accent name.
I longed to be like my parents, my jumped-ship, dark-skinned father, my mother who didn’t always have shoes but “always had plenty to eat, good food, too, because that’s what mattered to us.” I wanted to be, in short, the person they were trying so very hard to ensure I would not become.
I knew even then that a lot of what we had was a sham. We couldn’t always pay the bills. My father’s small business depended on Greeks getting seats on Akron’s City Council or other positions of power. We were one city council member or one or two or maybe three doctor’s bills away from losing the house. I knew even though nobody ever said so, and even though, when it finally happened, I was out of high school, out of college, out of graduate school, working my first “real” academic job.
But, even then, as when I had been a child, there was very little I could do. I felt the same helplessness I’d feel when a bill collector would call when I was 10 or 12 or 17. I could do nothing but help my father pack up his belongings and move.
In short, was always both ashamed of what we had and terrified of losing everything. The fact that I felt that way—both ashamed of where I lived, and worried about how much of a sham it was—was a personal failure, I reasoned.
“That isn’t what he was saying at all,” the only black woman in my class said, snapping me back into that air conditioned room.
“You weren’t listening.”
“I agree,” said a pretentious white woman. “You weren’t listening at all.”
The truth was, I was listening, hard, but not to what anyone was saying. I was listening, instead, as I always had, to what no one was saying, to the ellipses, the blank spaces on a page I hadn’t written yet.
Because I couldn’t find the words. Because, maybe, there were no words.
I was listening to the fear in the room—the histories that we either weren’t claiming or that we were claiming only because it was finally acceptable, even honorable, to do so—if we did so in an acceptable way. The anger had to be aimed at the right people. There had to be a little humor mixed in somewhere. We had to call for revolution even if we were just sitting around in a little circle talking about how to get our poems published day in and day out.
In short, we had to claim our history in a way that was not demeaning to us, our families, or “our people.”
“I hate that phrase, ‘my people,’” a Jewish woman said once, in the same workshop, about something I’d written. “It tells us so little. It tells us nothing, really.”
“Your people originated that phrase,” I shot back at her. There was a horrified silence--but to her credit, she laughed.
“That doesn’t mean it’s any good,” she said back, not the least bit angry, as if she’d heard it before, as if it was perfectly acceptable to call her out on her Jewishness, or lack thereof.
I wanted so badly to claim my people that I couldn’t claim them. I wanted to claim them to prove I’d never been ashamed. I wanted…
I wanted to tell the truth, but I wasn’t sure what it was anymore.
“What I get from this poem is how brave your mother was,” one of my friends said when we met, as we often did, at a coffee shop to look over new poems. “How incredibly and undeniably brave. I wish I could write about a mother like that.”
I had to call her brave. To say my mother was terrified, all the time, would have been demeaning. It would have been only half the truth, just as saying she was brave was only have the truth.
She was so brave in so many ways, ways I’ve explored throughout my work, ways that really matter. But she was also bound up in a deep fear of some unnamable danger. She was scared to let us ride our bikes on the road, to sleep over at somebody’s house, to eat the wrong foods, to...
The world outside those three acres, outside the tight-knit Greek community that, let’s face it, wasn’t anywhere near us, geographically, was safe. The only safe “place.”
“Have you ever been to a sleepover?” a blond girl asked me in the fourth grade on our way out to recess.
I knew what this was about: I’d told my best friend, privately, that my mom wouldn’t let me go to sleepovers.
But the truth was that just that weekend I’d slept over at my friend Stephanie’s. But somehow, in my mind, that didn’t count. She was a Greek girl, an Ikarian girl, which meant her parents knew my parents, her grandparents knew my grandparents, we had been to each other’s hometowns—the ones in Greece, of course, not the false ones here in the states—and so, we weren’t friends. We were something stronger than friends, sisters, cousins, whatever.
“Have you?” the blond girl pressed. I heard three other girls behind her giggling, but I couldn’t look up at them. I had always hated all four of these girls. I couldn’t believe my best friend had told them.
“Yes,” I said, confidently. “I slept over at my friend Stephanie’s two nights ago.”
“Stephanie? Who’s that?”
“She goes to my church,” I said.
They giggled some more. “Right. Stephanie. She goes to your weird Zeus-worshiping church.”
More laughter.
“We don’t worship Zeus anymore,” I said.
“Anymore,” one of them said, and they looked at each other, a knowing look, and started laughing all over again.
This was supposed to be about metaphor. It was going to be, actually, a blog entry about how I wanted so badly to explain to my students today that seeing metaphors in the world, that recognizing them suddenly or after a great deal of rewriting, was, maybe, the best reward of being a writer. That being able to connect one thing to another—to actually conjure a sensory and a spiritual and a rational connection all at once, and then translate it into words—was the most important work a writer could do.
I wanted to call up that quote from Adrienne Rich from 2001 in which she reminds us that we will be saved by metaphors alone—that we must resist language that manipulates and shames, language that stays on the surface, if we hope ever to overcome polarizing divisions. Only I couldn’t remember the quote, or even the gist of it, not while I was in class.
I was unnerved by the two international students who kept raising their hands to ask about the homework, the native American girl who whispered, “Are we going to do this for the whole hour?”, who I snapped at, who told me, later, that she felt really sick and just wanted to know what she would miss if she left class. I was unnerved, too, by the boy who couldn’t stop talking and the girl who got red when we read an excerpt from a story with sexual content and the fact that no matter how many times I tell them to slow down, to just listen to each other, they can’t. They’re too busy trying to be smart, just as I was in graduate school and wished I could have been at their age.
I was unnerved because I wasn’t sure I could teach them anything that mattered.
I was unnerved, too, by the thickly falling snow and the fact that soon, I would be driving my daughter to an appointment an hour and a half away, and I didn’t want to do it. I have been inexplicably gripped by fear whenever I’m behind a wheel lately, not just in the snow. This is marginally due to the fact that my cousin died in a freak accident a year ago, that I’ve had a few near misses since then, but—but it feels bigger than that. Almost genetic.
I keep thinking about my mother, who appeared so calm and brave but hated it when we would go out on the road on our bikes.
Terrified. So terrified that…
That what? That we weren’t allowed to ride our bikes? To go to sleep overs? So what?
After my class, my daughter and I set out, as we do every other week, only this time T was working and so it was just the two of us, which meant I had to drive. I soon realized, after the second semi passed me, after the third time we dipped into a tiny, fogged-over valley and couldn’t see more than two feet in front of us, after the fourth time my tire slipped a little, and I imagined myself and my daughter stranded in a ditch on a ferociously cold day, unable to get help, freezing to death, well…
I turned around.
“I was feeling a little nervous all along,” S said. “I just didn’t want to tell you, because I could tell you were already nervous.”
And so we went out to eat, because we’d planned to do so, as usual, after her appointment. Over supper, she confessed, “I think I’m afraid of everything. My fear is like…like a tornado. I’m in the eye, but it’s swirling all around me, and if…”
She stopped, looked at me to check my understanding.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. If you step into the wind…”
“I’m afraid I’m going to die,” she said more bluntly. “That something really bad could happen, and then I would be dead.”
“What else are you afraid of?”
“Getting older. More responsibility. You and T breaking up. Losing you. Losing T. Saying or doing the wrong thing so one of you gives up on me. Being in a car with you driving.” At that, she smiled a little, relaxed. “But right now I’m just hungry. I wish they would bring us some bread.”
“Do you know what I do when I’m afraid?” I asked. “I try to figure out what I can control, and what I can’t. And what I can’t control, I try to let go of. And what I can control, I make a plan to do my best to control that part of things, and then try to move on.”
“Like if the roads are slippery, go slower.”
“Yes. But you can’t do anything about the other cars.”
“So don’t pay attention to them?” she asked.
“Well, not exactly. Just try…try not to step into the twirling wind of the tornado if you don’t have to. Or else break through it really really fast, so you’re on the outside. And then you can see the tornado’s moving away from you, or at least standing still, and it’s not so scary.”
“And what if it turns around and starts coming back the other way?”
“That’s when you run,” I said, and we laughed, and our food came, and we were warm and full and together.
“I know you love me,” she said, in between bites, “and that T loves me.” And she said it as if it were definitely enough, as if any betrayal or horror she might endure later would be manageable as long as we loved each other, and I realized how right she was.
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