Post #63 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Diana Y. Paul, guest book reviewer
Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home reminds me of an intellectual version of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
In 1991-1993 the cultural anthropologist Ann Armbrecht embarked on an 18-month journey to Nepal to collect information for her dissertation on conservation development. In the opening scene she is planting seedlings in the thick mud of a rice paddy in Hedangna, a remote and isolated village. In a very complex yet contradictory dual unfolding of a young woman’s self-discovery together with a painful awareness of the dissolution of her marriage, she explores a culture as far removed from her own as can be imagined.
The ostensible purpose of Armbrecht’s journey to Hedangna is to examine how a close connection to the land affects the quality of personal relationships. Hedangna is soon to be part of a national park that will disrupt their community and livelihood. The author’s assumption/belief is that indigenous people have a wisdom about how to live on the land that Westernized (=industrialized) societies have lost. Is this assumption accurate? Does the industrialized model of private ownership of the land remove a quality of community and sacredness that the Hedangna had preserved? Ambrecht intends to answer these questions.
“I wanted to learn what it meant to live with my hands and my feet and my heart—to remember what these women’s ways of living have never let them forget.” (pp. 10-11) What Armbrecht very, very slowly realizes is that the less commercial, more traditional ways in Hedangna also have heavy costs for its residents, especially women. A young woman, who perhaps is the closest to a friend that the author makes, complains to her that she harvests rice and carries water all day to her home and even all night in her dreams. There is no escape. She has few other experiences to dream about.
The pilgrimage seems to be more of a disembarking, a detour in the author’s life: to find a new beginning where she meets her “new grandmother” (Baiseti Thuma) as well as female friends, particularly Devimaya. But how much of a burden she is on those she lives with is not often acknowledged: namely, that others are forced to worry about her safety from a sense of duty and responsibility for the strange foreign woman in their midst. Nor do we learn about the feeling of emptiness she has with regard to her own family and friends back in the States.
Perhaps the author intends the reader to ponder on these questions. No memoir can encompass all aspects of a story. When you read this memoir, reflect on what you think may be unanswered questions and see how you want to handle this aspect of writing in your memoir. Perhaps the relevant questions about your story are answered or maybe you just think they are. It is important to consider your story from your reader’s point of view.
Armbrecht is sometimes aware of her own self-absorption: “my research kept me trapped inside.” (p. 149) “I was still so preoccupied with my struggle to understand the relationships between the different types of information that I was scarcely aware of the path beneath my feet.” (pp. 114-115) At other times she realizes that her great material good fortune and interest in Nepalese culture seem almost incomprehensible to the villagers and that “their envy brought out my selfishness.” (p. 123) These courageous revelations pull the reader in, yearning for more.
As the honeymoon of the beauty and community devolves erratically into the culture shock of the harsh physical toll of daily survival in the village, her husband Brian comes for occasional visits. These points in her memoir are most revealing for what they do not say. We do not know what he does, besides being a photographer concerned about land conservation. Yet he travels halfway across the globe to visit her under extraordinary conditions and is welcomed and accepted easily by the village men. I wondered how this made her feel. Granted village men’s living conditions are easier than women’s. They play cards and drink, after plowing the fields. Ann Armbrecht, on the other hand, struggles heroically to join in daily rice planting, hauling water, and attempting to chop wood—all extremely difficult physical work—in order to be accepted by the village women.
“Thin Places,” the title of her memoir, refers to where “one’s nerve endings are bare.” (p. 87) And the flash moments of self-reflection, on how much she has lost, how she has no place where she feels at home (except for a nostalgic reverie about Hedangna), are often heart-breaking. The reader is left vaguely wondering if the author has lost an opportunity to be completely, if devastatingly, honest—about how she could not expend an heroic effort to save her marriage at the same time that she was willing and sensitive to the most oblique of consequences in the daily interactions of the Hedangna villagers. One example of this insensitivity: when Brian comes to visit her for the first time, after an arduous trek during monsoon season. On first seeing him, she blurts out that he shouldn’t have worn shorts with all the leeches in the marshes. He retorts that she has a leech on her upper lip. The great divide that the culture of Nepal represents for an American is microscopic compared with the divide between Armbrecht and her husband.
Thin Places is absolutely fascinating, the writer vividly portraying remote village life in 90’s Nepal.
As a memoir writer, you might consider your own thin places and fearlessly investigate the cultural divides in your own life.
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Diana Y. Paul, guest reviewer, is a former Stanford professor of Buddhist philosophy and cultures and has traveled twice to Nepal and once to Tibet. She currently is a printmaker, specializing in a Japanese aesthetic combined with a mixed media approach to the image, usually an organic one, with an element of surprise or the unexpected. Food and other organic themes are her favorites. For a sample of her writing and art, see: The Secret of Lasagna and Ascent Aspirations (September 2010 issue).
