Friday, April 12, 2013

Where I'm From

"The truth is, I didn't mind returning to the floor, mainly because I didn't know anything different." 


Ghostbread is a reflective narrative of childhood spent on the edges of American life. This is a story that demonstrates how the deep desperation, longing, and emptiness of poverty can touch people of any background; how family fights to fill in the gaps. Sonja Livingston has received much acclaim and honorifics for her writing, and Ghostbread tells the story of how far she's come. In an interview on BookSlut.com, Sonja comments, when talking about what motivated her to formulate her book, "I was encouraged to continue my narcissism. Which is only partly a joke. [...] But, the irony is that writing a memoir has allowed me to get over myself." 

Sonja Livingston as a child
All memoirs are a journey within for the writer, but what makes them so valuable is that, as Sonia says, beyond the sense of "I'm so different, I'm so special," there are tangible threads tying together the tapestry of human experience. The personal is a key that unlocks the door to the universal. 

 Ghostbread is a wonderful example of this, where any one can find some common piece in the story.
Her tone is charmingly honest; the story begins, "I know where I came from," and she means this literally, yet figuratively simultaneously. Tied in with the story of her biological origins are the seeds, sewn in technicolor metaphors and symbolism, of her ever-shifting journey toward adulthood. 

Sonja spends her childhood, one among seven, fatherless is a brood of fatherless children, to a single white mother. Her brothers and sisters are many-colored, Native American, Hispanic, African American, and white. Growing up in the seventies, primarily on the East Coast, and poor, this meant that she and her siblings were always different enough to never quite fit in. Living on a delicately balanced mixture of grace, wit, and charity, the idea of home has no real sense of place, but instead, a sense of context and company. Home in Ghostbread is woven out of home cooking, story telling, and shared sorrow. 
Sonja's mother wasn't ashamed, or, if she was, she never let on. "Live free or die-I'm telling you girl, there's no other way to be," says her mother, quoting the motto of her birth-state, New Hampshire. As much as others around them looked in on their family and saw something lacking, according to Sonja's mother, all was as it should be. This determination and sense of rightness was one ingredient of the glue that held their family together, however tenuous it was at times. 
Dancing through short, one-to-three page chapters, small snippets of experience woven in here and their convey succinctly the nature of longing that is never having enough. She describes a time when she is still small, finding  five dollars, and "[discovering] what it felt like to swallow the sky," before coming back down to earth, and feeling heavy with guilt and sympathy for the Girl Scout among the troop that passed their house who had dropped it. No trinket is so trivial, no amount of money so small, that it escapes endowment with heavy emotional and ethical value, far beyond that of the surround culture, in the eyes of young Sonja and her family. 
Despite their mother's taciturn disposition, and often unrelenting tenacity, their were moments when her fear hovered just beneath her words. Some young girls are murdered in New York City: poor, catholic, ("Like Us," thinks Sonja,) drawn by hunger to the temptation of food proffered by a seemingly benevolent stranger. Her mother darkens with fearful thoughts, and Sonja imagine a dozen ways to resist this hypothetical temptation, so terrified in her personal identification with the victims. In this, there is a deep sense of nakedness and vulnerability. Behind the woman who doles out bizarre punishments to incredulous children with a hatchet in hand, the woman who anticipates losing her home and so begins the family activity of saving supplies, and says when they can't pay rent at last, "we're going camping," with a smile, is young mother, fighting for all she's worth to be both a nurturer, life-giver, meal-maker, and a protector, rule-maker, provider to these seven unique children. 
With the exception of the short time they spent living in a small house in a rural community, where most of time was spent at home with family, being white wasn't an advantage for Sonja during the majority of her childhood. From the Reservations to inner-city New York, always in the poorest counties, the poorest neighborhoods, and often among the poorest in the area, she was always, "The White Girl." Her siblings of other hues were not spared, being found too light, or just too unique to fit in to any one niche. "'Why would they pick on us' I asked, Why? Why? Why?" she writes, to which her beloved sister venomously answers, "Why do you think?" Poverty, Sonja explains, has a way of dragging anyone down: to outsider status, to shame, to loneliness, to the sullen pride of refusing hand-outs. No one is impervious to it's effects.

 She tried hard, and failed to be invisible in her class in New York where she was the only white student, with a teacher who would never let her forget that. She burned with shame when her Native-looking sister, and dearest friend, was admonished by the old Chief on the Seneca Reservation not to share the candy she bought from him with the little "white-face." As she and her siblings grew into teenagers, they formed and shaped themselves in earnest to find some way of fitting in. With quiet desperation, she would flip through fashion magazines, do yard work with her sisters, saves pennies and quarters and dollars bills, in order to buy the right clothes, find the right out fit to be accepted. Despite this superficial attempt at belonging, she begins to form real friendship, and discover things of true value within herself.

In the end, Ghostbread weaves a story of alienation and determinism, into one of perseverance and transcendence. 

 "When you eat soup every night, thoughts of bread get you through."


Sonja Livingston
Sonjia Livingston was born in January, 1968, and spent most of her youth in the state of New York. She eventually graduated high school and went on to college. She now holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans, and a Master's in Education from SUNY Brockport. After publishing essays for several years in literary journals, Ghostbread was published as her first book. In addition to holding the honor of a New York State Fellowship in Literature, Pushcart Prize Nomination, and an Iowa Review Award, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at The University of Memphis. Despite her sense of satisfaction with the life she has built for herself, there still remains a humble sense of uncertainty about where life will take her, and which ingredients of life it really was which allowed her to get beyond the circumstances she was born into.

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