On the verge of breaking down

FUNKE ADETUTU

In the mid-1990s when R. Kelly released his album, I believe I can Fly, it was a hit. It was played in every nook and cranny of the country. So it was no surprise that as a student then, I was captivated by the inspirational lyric and Kelly’s great voice. In fact, it got to a point I had to learn the lyric by heart. It was the song I loved to listen to whenever my spirit was low or I was experiencing difficult times.
I can still vividly remember a particular line of the song which has remained on my mind ever since: “See I was on the verge of breaking down, sometimes silence can seem so loud.”
About two months ago, I chanced upon Isabel Allende’s novel, Paula, which I began to read almost immediately. That was the first time I would be coming upon Allende’s book. I’ve heard of House of the Spirits, which was her first novel but I have never read it. I was captivated by the first line of Paula. And it was after I had gone more than halfway into the novel that I realised how instructive it was for Isabel Allende to have begun her novel that way. “Listen, Paula, I am going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost. The legend of our family begins at the end of the last century...” read the first and second lines. For me, there is no better way a great writer can start a novel of this nature, especially when the writer is in such great despair.
Paula is a true-life story about the anguish of the author whose daughter, Paula, falls gravely ill and thereafter sinks into a coma. The novel was written during the interminable hours the author spent in the corridors of a Madrid hospital (which she called the corridor of lost steps) and in the hotel room where she lived for several months, as well as beside her daughter’s bed back home in California, USA during the summer and fall of 1992.
It was an agonising period for Isabel Allende who had passed through so much in life marriage-wise besides being born into a family which was at the centre of the 1970s political turmoil in Chile.
For me, the narrative is more than a memoir. It is a tender, moving and vivid record of a mother’s agony at the bedside of her daughter. It’s a long letter written by a mother to a dying child in an effort to restore her fast ebbing life. The author shares with the readers her most intimate feelings which results in an emotionally charged, spellbinding memoir.
Life throws all sorts of things our way, and for some people, the best way to pour out the anguish lurked in the inner recesses of their minds is to write. Through their writings, many authors have climbed huge mountains and surmounted great challenges. For most authors and musicians, the deeper the wound, the more private the grave until they let it out through their music or book.
All they need is a medium that will enable them pour out that emotion, the feeling that has been bottled up in their minds; and writing provides the veritable platform on which to do so. Hence, writing, like music, is an escape from emotion for most people when they are alone, when the days are longer and the nights darker; when solitude leaves them bitter. They have more than enough to write once they are blown on all sides by the strong wind of hopelessness. Therefore, they have nothing else to do but remember. Remember the dark days
Their unvoiced wail is usually so intense such that their readers or listeners cannot help but hear it. Little wonder, then, that Paula is a pretty lengthy narrative filled with weariness and pain. It’s a combination of long periods of angry silence during the author’s childhood and adolescence.
In the long silent hours of writing, authors trample on memories; all that happened in one instant of their lives, as if their entire lives are a single, unfathomable image. The child, boy or girl they were, the woman or man they are, the old man or woman they shall be, are all water in the same rushing torrent. Their memories are like a Mexican Mural in which all times are simultaneous.
This is the way I have learnt to go. To either be like the novelist by putting my experience down on paper or singing. I have learnt to tread the path of the writer who, on the verge of breaking down, puts her feelings into writing.