That first clause permanently lives on the tip of my tongue.
History has failed us. Yes, yes it has. Us as in the average creatures, the lower and middle and forever rising classes of wherever we’re lucky or unlucky enough to call home. The skin-tinted, the femme, the non-binary, the vulnerable and even—or especially—the ignorant. Those four words in such broad context can reach communities worlds apart. They can feel demeaning or invite a permanent state of hopelessness. They often light our fires and convince us to engage in combat, losses be damned. But these words tease me in another peculiar way.
To me, the first four words are like bullies slamming my body against a gym locker reminding me again and again just how fragile and weak my own understanding of history—my memory—can be. I’ve written about being tormented by an unreliable memory in the past, what it means to mourn something you can’t remember. This writing exercise is reminding me to look for the prepositional component when the bullies attack next. Look beyond the comma. Beyond the past.
The next three words are dressed in defiance. But no matter. They counter the bullies. They are my fairy godmothers, my singing mice. These words build me into a historian, a memory-saver, a writer with a purpose. The purpose: to confront history, no matter how much it has failed us. The words push me to become a writer so in tune with the present that her future self will look back and remember it all if only through sporadic journal entries, corner-of-the-page doodles and lonely notepads at the bottom of the junk drawer.
Years after reading this first sentence from Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, a stunning four-generational saga of a Korean family in Japan, the words continue to haunt me and move my pen forward. It’s not just my memories they’ve saved. The words have propelled me to commit to writing my own family’s story, too. A story I’m incessantly afraid of losing and forgetting as generations die out.
It’s true that history has failed my family and my people plenty. But we’ve also put up quite a fight. We’ve also persevered, raised eyebrows and swayed naysayers to question the convenient truths history has fed them since birth. History has failed us, but no matter. I don’t want to forget the latter half of this sentence. So here it is, a reminder documented on both paper and web. Just in case.
—fiza
Prompt from #TheIsolationJournals, a 30-day creativity project to help make sense of these challenging times. Join in!
Choose a line from a book—you can grab the nearest one and flip it open to a random page, or pick an old favorite you’ve memorized by heart. Whatever grabs your attention; whatever intrigues. Use it as the opening sentence for today’s journal entry, and let the words flow from there.