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Caine Prize 2016: “Memories We Lost”—The Text, Its Readers and the World, a review by Pede Hollist

By Africa in Words Guest on 24 June , 2016 • ( 1 )

AiW Guest Pede Hollist

Lidudumalingani

The biography at the end of “Memories We Lost” quotes South African writer, filmmaker, and photographer Lidudumalingani as saying, “I am fascinated by mental illnesses, having seen my own extended relatives deal with it.” He also tell readers the story represents his efforts at “trying to …invent ways that could help [him] write about how one family is dealing” with mental illness.

I suppose if a writer so clearly spells out his intent, we should honor it. Yes, “Memories We Lost” is about the effects of schizophrenia, initially described as “this thing” that takes, abducts, the narrator’s younger sister, causes her inexplicable behaviors, and, over time, robs the siblings of the ability to speak and remember. This inability, in fact, explains the episodic structure of the narrative, a series of loosely connected vignettes of the unnamed sister’s behaviors—running away from home at night, banging her head on a wall until it bleeds, breaking furniture in a classroom, throwing hot porridge on the also unnamed narrator’s chest—and the remedies to cure them: a traditional healer who baked his patients in order to kill the demons inside them; ineffective Christian prayers and church sermons; and the depressive counterproductive effects of herbal, psychotropic medications. Written as a reflection on these past experiences, the narrative structure represents the older sister’s attempt to make sense of her memories and a family fractured by its experiences with a schizophrenic daughter whose father also suffered from the disorder. Lidudumalingani deserves praise not only for the deft handling of the topic, but also for making the narrative technique mimic the disjunctive experience of understanding and coping with schizophrenia without burdening the story with Jekyll and Hyde personalities, interior monologues, surrealism and other postmodern techniques.

Thankfully, though, there is no unbroken line between a writer’s intent, the words and technique of his art, and its reception once it enters the public domain. “Memories We Love” registers as more than a personal, even if fictionalized, account of a family dealing with mental illness. How can a text by a black South African writer dealing with this “thing” that has “abducted” an unspecified and confounded family and community not trigger readers’ memories, real or vicarious, of a nation that was once in the midst of the schizophrenia of Apartheid and is now, literally (pun intended), inventing ways to understand and heal a national disorder that, like the afflicted daughter of the story, is transgenerational? How can Lidudumalingani’s intent prevent readers from leaping from text to world when every text stands as a metaphor, and the sisters appear to represent, metonymically, a South Africa dealing with its unresolved and painful schizophrenic past? Perhaps the biographical note is a strategic misdirection. Therefore, we should trust not the author but the text.

By Chris&Kerri (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

“wake up once the sun was up and walk again, to somewhere”

It provides social commentary without the muscularity of satire or authorial indignation. Its appropriately sedate but clear prose alerts without alarming, informs without instructing. It is sufficiently ambiguous without being incomprehensible. It touches on the boundary between reality and fiction, fiction and nonfiction, imagination and lunacy. It hints at the love and pain of protecting a sister’s secret. It does all that and generates, as every good story should, concern for the fate of the protagonists, the sisters, on their march to escape from their village. Will they put enough distance between themselves and the home, memories, and secrets that stamp them as belonging to a family known for mental illness? Will the younger one overcome her affliction? Are the memories lost an expression of regret, a statement of fact, or an affirmation of achievement? Does the “We” of the title refer to the sisters, South Africans, or readers? The text, intentionally, leaves these questions unanswered, telling only that after their night’s sleep, the sisters will “wake up once the sun was up and walk again, to somewhere”—perhaps, for readers, to a future South African world (or text) which might provide answers.

Lidudumalingani’s story rewards careful reading, is a deserving selection for the Caine Prize shortlist, and is another example of the range of topics African short story writers continue to cover with skill and confidence.

Pede Hollist is an associate professor of English at The University of Tampa, Florida. His work draws upon the African consciousness, showing through literature the experiences of those on the continent and the experiences of those a part of the African diaspora. His short stories have appeared in Ìrìnkèrindò: A Journal of African Migration , on the Sierra Leone Writers Series Web site, and in Matatu 41-12. His short story Foreign Aid was shortlisted for the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing (read our AiW review here ). So the Path Does Not Die ( reviewed for AiW here ) is his first novel.

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Bookforum talks with Lidudumalingani Mqombothi

When Lidudumalingani Mqombothi (he coolly goes by his first name) sat down to write " Memories We Lost ," the short story that won him the 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing , he’d finished film school having felt frustrated at the lack of creative freedom on which film schools tend to pride themselves. The story, which he previously sought to turn into a film, concerns two teenage sisters, the younger of whom battles an unnamed mental illness in a community that seeks to cure her through traditional means. The older sister attempts to protect her sister from her illness and her community while assuming the role of the narrator. Bookforum spoke to the South African writer, photographer, and filmmaker over Skype about the idea behind "Memories," the role of film and photography in his writing, and the relationship between the Caine Prize and African literature.

Firstly, congratulations on your Caine Prize win. Not only was it well-deserved, but it also stood in good company among the other shortlisted stories this year. In "Memories We Lost," you center the story around mental illness and how it is spoken about and dealt with within a specific South African context. I’m interested to know what brought you to that idea?

The subject of mental illness was always there for me years before I even wrote the story. When I was in film school, I had wanted to make a movie on schizophrenia but I didn’t. Two years before I wrote the story, a friend of mine was trying to write a play about her own father who has Alzheimer’s. I think the play was centered around the idea of the family and the different ideas they had about taking him to a home. So all of those things that happened contributed to mental illness being an obsession of mine, something I wanted to make either a movie out of or write a short story about.

The relationship between the two sisters in the story is an intimate and complex one. You do a really great job of showing a close sisterly bond without resorting to cliches of sentimentality, competition, or jealousy, which tend to dominate literature that deals with relationships between teenage girls. Was gender something you thought about when you came up with the main characters for "Memories We Lost" ?

I sat down to write a story and the characters were girls. That’s how it worked out. I didn’t think about the gender. For me, what was important was to have three characters in the story: the mother who represents a different generation, the girl with schizophrenia at the center of the story, and the sibling who then has opposite ideas to the mother. The story is also about the different thinking between an older generation and a younger generation.

You give readers a slice of rural South African life through short, evocative scenes. I think of when the sisters are chasing each other around the rondavel (hut) and the younger sister bangs her head against the wall and bleeds. That moment gives a sense of how this disease manifests itself within such an environment. Has this world which you capture so well influenced you as a writer?

I think to an extent, but I’m quite reluctant to commit myself to being that writer who writes about the villages because I’ve lived in the city as long. My idea of writing about a place is to always write with respect. The idea of it would be to know the village, not to make it up. There’s a scene where they are looking out into the field and the landscape. That would be the same thing I would’ve seen when I was growing up. For that reason, I think it was important for me, and I think generally in my writing, for my characters to be aware of what’s around them. My idea is always to make the characters aware of that setting. They need to know what's around in that setting.

I was struck by the fact that you chose to leave the two main characters nameless. You also chose not to diagnose the mental illness immediately.

Yeah, so I’m interested in names but also I’m so interested in what it means when someone doesn’t have a name. Does it mean they’re not fully human? People want to know other people’s names, right? But I wanted people to feel for these girls even though they don’t know their names. They know their story, they know their pain, and they can connect with them on that level without knowing their names. There was never a point where I felt that the girls needed to have names, so I decided they were not going to have names. In writing about this one community in the story, what their relationship is with mental illness, it was important to present a sense of not knowing. I felt it was important for readers to experience it from the community's point of view.

I’m curious about your relationship is with memory because the name of your short story is "Memories We Lost." Then in the " The Art of Suspense ," which is a short nonfiction piece about growing up listening to soccer matches on the radio in your native village of Zikhovane, you write, “Only a handful of things in life are an exact science, memory is not one of them.” Are you fascinated by memory?

Well, one thing: I have a very bad memory. So I think memory is fascinating for me because a lot of it is about how we live. We’re always remembering things. And I can't imagine a life where people don’t remember things. And when we don't remember, what then do you fill in those places? If you grew up in a house that you no longer remember, what do you then picture as the house that you grew up in? And for the people who can remember, which details do they remember? That said though, sometimes it’s convenient to forget. If you’ve had a terrible experience, perhaps sometimes the best thing to do is to forget. So I’m interested in those kind of things. What do we have to forget? What are we encouraged to forget? What won’t we want to forget?

At times, the prose read like an extended monologue because of its lyricism and use of verse. The Nigerian critic, Ikhide Ikheloa, expressed that some of the stories from the Caine Prize finalists read “as mere reportage with hints of creative nonfiction.” What’s your take on that?

Usually when I read, I’m just a reader. Ikhide [Ikheloa] read those stories as a critic. I think like any reader, I have my own preferences when it comes to literature. My personal one would be poetry in the writing. That’s all I’m interested in when I’m reading. So I suppose I cannot write any other way, otherwise I wouldn't be able to stand it. I’m also open to the idea that people are not like me. My story, at some point, people accused of not being sentimental enough. And I’m completely fine with that idea because that’s what that reader likes. But I don’t like that and I’ll never write that kind of story. I like to think of myself as one of those writers who cares about every single sentence and who cares about the poetry of the story. The way that I think about writing is in terms of movies. So you get a movie that will have a sex scene or a love scene and that’s enough. Then you get movies that have a love scene that’s in slow motion and there’s romantic music and there’s flowers in the air—that’s a bit too much.

It’s interesting you mention film because you’re also a filmmaker and a photographer. I get the impression that film and photography could help with imagery and narrative, because you’re so used to thinking about the mechanics of a story and how it moves from scene to scene. Do these mediums play a role in how you write?

I’ve been asked this question so many times and my answer has been different each time! I’m beginning to tell lies, actually. I think to an extent they do. For me, a photograph is a perfect sentence. I then think of my writing like a movie because the story has to go forward, it has to move. A photograph is the poetry and a movie is how it goes forward. That’s how I think about it, or least in this interview! I admire writers who try their hand at understanding art and composition and the way artists think, because it can be beneficial to writing. All these things come together when I have to write anything because my brain is already wired in that way. I’m already thinking in those terms about how the story has to be visual.

The Caine Prize is considered one of the most prestigious awards for African writers writing in English, but there’s been some debate about whether it deserves the prominence it’s bestowed. I recall the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina once stating in an interview that he felt the Caine Prize was held in too high esteem in some literary circles. Do you think it affords African writers a larger platform for their work to be read?

I think it certainly does. The way I think about the Caine Prize is that it’s the very last step in the story. I wrote my story way before the Caine Prize was involved. My story got published. The book came out. People read the story and the Caine Prize picked up on that story. So I don’t know if it’s fair to blame the Caine Prize for the stories that African writers produce. The Caine Prize is simply there to pick up on stories that have already been published. I don’t even like the argument of how the Caine Prize is destroying or not doing justice to African literature. There’s no way that it’s not doing things for African writers. You look at all the past winners who’ve gone on to produce novels. So I think the Caine Prize is good for African writers but I also think that African writers should not be concerned about the Caine Prize when they write their short stories.

When we discuss African literature, it can feel like a comparative exercise. A lot of emphasis is placed on the West and whether some writers are perpetuating age-old stereotypes of the continent, or disregarding the realities of many in favor of stories that document the lives of traveling African elites. Either way, a menacing presence of the West is always assumed and elevated in these conversations, which is not always helpful or entirely true. Sometimes I fear that the imagination and creativity of young African writers is at stake because they have to be painstakingly aware of all these considerations.

I think we have to be careful of these ideas because what tends to happen is African writers end up not writing about things that matter to them. There are rituals in the West that I look at and go, "These people are fucking crazy. Why would they even do that?" But some will say, "This is what we do." And that’s how I think we should do it. There are the conversations that we, as Africans, are having and they're not strange to us because we know about them. I have no interest in people who read my stories and get shocked. "Oh, did that really happen?" I’m like, "Yeah it happens, but really, don’t be shocked because I’m not even interested in your shock." People are people, and people get up to different things around the world. So it’s quite a delicate thing to balance.

Do you have any projects in the pipeline?

I’m working towards a novel and I have been even before the Caine Prize. I’m also going to be on the eighth draft of a script I’ve been writing for the past two years which I hope will be my first feature film. It’s just a lot to think about and I’m trying to make a movie that I’m going to watch.

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MEMORIES WE LOST by Lidudumalingani Mqombofhi - Memories we Lost and Other Stories Study Guide

Next Topic » HOW MUCH LAND DOES MAN NEED by Leo Tolstoy - Memories we Lost and Other Stories Study Guide

About the Author

The setting, the narrator, the sick sister, effects of mental illness, mental illness, love and empathy, ignorance and superstition, use of symbolism, use of satire.

The author Lidudumalingani was born in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa in a village called Zikhovane.

Lidudumalingani is a writer, filmmaker and a photographer. He grew up herding cattle and moulding goats from clay and later grew fond of words and images.

He writes about music, art, culture and films for the Mail, Guardian and Africa is my country.

He has published in literature journals Chimurenga chronic and pufrock and the second short, sharp story collection Adults only.

He currently lives in Cape Town.

Memories we lost is a biography. The life of a sister seen by a younger sister.

The story is about mental illness and its effect.

It is first described as this thing that takes the narrator's younger sister. Over time it robs the sister of the ability to speak and remember hence the title Memories we lost. The title is a reflection of loss and regret.

The story is set in South Africa, indeed the author Lidudumalingani is a South African. A number of South African indigenous words are used in the story.

The story Memories we lost is about challenges brought by mental illness to the victim and those around them.

The mental illness is schizophrenia. It is a mental disorder characterized by many symptoms. It causes a breakdown in the relationship between thoughts, feelings and actions. There are many causes of the disease and hereditary is one of them. It's no wonder the disease runs in the narrator's family. The narrator's father was a scherophrene.

Events and actions in the story rotate around a sick sister. The sickness is terrifying and attacks without warning.

The narrator tells us that after the attack is over she would mumble a prayer and would embrace the sister for a long time. This suggests to the reader that the illness is horrific and painful. In one of these attacks the sick sister screams and disappears into, the night. All men and boys go out in search of her. The men or boys disoriented and peered shuffled in the dark and split into some groups as instructed by a man " Hours later they return but without the sister. It is the mother who returns the following day carrying the daughter.

In a different episode as the narrator is telling her sister a story, she is seized by an attack and knocks her head on the wall so much one so hard that she bleed profusely. An effort to shield her from doing this fails because of the abnormal strength that the sister has during an attack. The episode is so memorable to the mind of the narrator and says, "The smell of blood lingered after many sunsets had come; even after the rain had come "

The disease makes the sister violent and destructive. This is evident in a case where she flung a desk across a room smashing the glass window. In yet another moment of attack the ill sister pours hot porridge on the sister's chest causing her a lot of pain and harm. It is due to the disease that the narrator's sister drops out of school and cannot continue with her schooling 'This thing, this thing that took over her followed her to school and had to drop out ' This makes the narrator who loves the sister so much to absent himself from school. Eventually suffering the same fate The narrator spends much time with the sister playing eg drawing sketches. It is while narrator is in school that she learns about schizophrenia. She comes to understand that it is what the sister was suffering from. She further learns that there is not medication for the disease and has no cure. The medicine she was taking was of no help. The sisters secretly decide not to take the medicine anymore "The first thing my sister and I got rid of was her arsenal of medication "

Henceforth they buried all the herbs and the narrator demonstrated to the sister how to fake taking medication drinks.

Like any good mother, the mother has made many attempts to have the girl cured. She has used herbs, modern medication, prayers and even consulted.

The younger sister tries as much as possible to bring the sister to be her old self. In one such episode the sisters are playing in the rain. They are happy and the disease appears to have 'left' the sister " We jumped in the rain in that moment, my sister returned; she smiled and laughed. That day we began to form new childhood memories, filling the void left by one that had been wiped out "

The mother sees them in this state and she imagines that the disease was going to come again. She organizes for another ritual to cure the daughter. This time round she organizes for a Nkunzi (witchdoctor) from another village famous for baking people on a fire from cow dung and wood. The narrator is aware that effects of ritual is unknown as dangerous ritual and says "l had not heard anyone who had survived either " She could not allow this to happen to the sister. The both ran away to the unknown place. Just like the father before them the two sisters are escaping from their village and the people. The want to put enough distance between themselves and the home memories and secrets that stamp them as belonging to a family known for mental illness.

But at the end hope is on sight, for after walking the whole night they reached a town and a hospital in sight. They knowingly fifteen each other grip.

Characterization

She is a sister to the mentally ill sister. The narrator and the sister have no names because they symbolize or represent others like them who love and live with mentally ill relatives.

The narrator is loving or affectionate . She loves the mentally ill sister despite her state. This is unlike many families where the mentally ill have no one to take care of them. When the sister 'comes out' of an attack she is always there for her "The embraces I remember, were always tight and long as if she hoped the moment would last forever " There seem to be a very strong bond of love between the two sisters.

The sibling's relation is loving and cordial. They even discuss their physical growth including the emergence of the sister's growth.

The narrator is curious inquisitive when she hears the mother and the uncle discussing the sister's illness in the morning she crouches near them to hear what they are saying. She is quite protective and protects the sister from the wrath of

Nkunzi a sangoma who 'bakes' patients with mental illness. They run away to another village. The narrator emphasizes with the sister. When called by an old aunt from the house, the narrator says, "we hugged tightly, my sister and I wiped each other's tears " She is inseparable from her sister, "the only way to have me turn away from her would be to cut us apart "

The narrator is courageous because she walks throughout the night with the sister alone in the villages as they are fleeing even with the dogs barking. She is religious and prayful. When the sister came out of an attack from mental attack she says "I stretched my arms out in all directions, mumbled two short prayers "

Most of the things we know about her are told by the sister.

She is mentally ill and because of this she is violent . She hauls a desk breaking the window in a class. She also violently harms herself by hitting her head against tree trump until she bleed. She pours hot porridge on her sister.

But she also loves and her relation to the sister is cordial and loving.

She is also secretive and emotional because she cries the whole night of the ritual but does not want the brother to know "...and she sunk her teeth in the pillow so that she would not cry.

She is determined . Her determination to have the daughter healed of the mental illness is admirable. She tries all forms of remedies including prayers, herbs, witchdoctors etc. We also see this determination when the daughter has a seize illness and runs away at night. All the men and boys return with the girl hopeless.

The mother comes far much later the following day after finding the daughter "...only returned home when the sun was up in the sky the next day, carrying my sister on her back.

She is a loving mother and her love is illustrated by the efforts she makes to make her daughter cured. She trys prayers, herbal medicine, modern medicine and witchcraft

She is paranoid fearful . On seeing her two daughters play in the rain she fears the disease might come back again, she calls the entire village for another ritual

There is only a mention of the father. He was a schizophrenia just like the daughter is but nobody mentions it. He left one day never to come back.

He was this mysterious and escapist because he was running away from the village and the people.

The author looks at mental illness and especially the effect on the victim and those living with a mentally ill person.

The mentally ill sister first loses her speech "The first thing that this took from us was speech " Pg 8. The sister is not coherent and speaks in a language that was unfamiliar, her words trembling as if trying to relay unthinkable revelations from the gods.

The disease has affected the thinking or the mental faulty of the sister in such a way that she cannot remember. Thus the disease takes away all her ability to remember "memories faded one after the other until our past was a blur"

Mental illness appears to have horrifying and dehumanizing effect on the victim. The attacks tear her apart so that when she regains herself she is totally different "Every time this nothing took her she returned altered, unrecognizable as if two people were trapped inside her.

The whole community is affected by mental illness. When the sister runs away due to the disease attack everybody is concerned and men.

The ritual to be performed by the Sangoma is attended by all the villagers showing it is a concern for everybody.

When the writer writes about mental illness the description is so vivid, It is as if you are right there with the victim. He describes this illnes, that the nameless protagonist calls this thing. Mental illness is a harrowing mindless and violent disease. It's not only the disease but the cure for the illness "The next day my sister would be taken to Nkunzi to be 'baked'. had heard of how Nkunzi baked people. He would make a fire from cow dung and wood and once the fire burnt red he would tie the demon possessed person into a section of the zinc rooting then place it on fire. He claimed to be baking the demons and that the person would recover from the burns a week later. I had not heard of anyone who died but I had not heard of anyone who lived either "The reader is saddened by the fate of those African countries who suffer fro mental illness, how they are caught in violent superstition.

The story brings out the reality in any African countries where ther are no facilities for the mentally ill. What serves as cure is often times cruel beyond telling of it. The mother does not understand why the same disease that afflicted her husband now afflicts her daughter. She doesn't know the disease is hereditary. People had come to believe that baking people from a fire by cow dung and wood would release them off demons. This leads death of patients rather than cure them "I had not heard of anyneo who had died but I had not heard of anyone who had lived either "

Memories we lost is a troubling piece depicting the great love between two siblings in a beautifully drawn landscape. Memories we lost is more than a story about mental illness. It between siblings who show great love and feeling toward other despite their faults. The narrator organizes for her and her sister to flee not only she cannot allow her sister to be 'baked' but helps her to run from the village to escape the embarrassment as shame of the ritual.

The elders refer to the disease as this thing and say it is the work of the devil and demons. Narrator says, "None of them knew my sister; none of them cared " The villagers are ignorant of the fact that the disease as a medical condition and should be treated as such.

Stylistic devices

The writer uses powerful images with the writings that are inspiring. The mental illness is not called by the name but this thing to show how embarrassed and shameful it is but also to portray ignorance of a community. The team returning from the search is described as 'morphed into defeated men' and 'their bodies slouched as if they had carried a heavy load 'to show the fatigue and frustration after the search from the sick girl. The modern building and a hospital that the narrator and the girl see after a sign of hope that finally the sister might be cured of her disease. After the sister hits her head on a tree continuously and she bleeds, the narrator says the bloodstain remained visible on the wall long after my mother scrubbed it off; long after she had applied three layers of mud and new water paint. The writer shows how horrible the incident was and that it will never be scrubbed in the narrator's memory.

The disease symbolizes a nation that once suffered schizophrenia of apartheid and just like the sister the country is trying to understand it and cure it. The nation is trying to understand and heal a national disorder. After the night's sleep, the sister will wake up once the sun is up and walk again to somewhere. This symbolizes a better South Africa.

Both the community and the religion are satirized for instead looking for a cure the community goes for medication that is very dangerous like calling the Nkunzi to 'bake' a living person. This endanger the girl more than cure her.

Religion is also satirized because even after much prayer it is providing a solution.

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‘Memories We Lost’ Wins 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing

July 16, 2016 MahoganyBooks Book News

South African Lidudumalingani has won the 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story ‘ Memories We Lost’ .

Lidudumalingani was presented with the £10,000 prize by chair of judges, Delia Jarret-Macauley, at a ceremony at the Bodleian Library in Oxford yesterday (4th July).

‘Memories We Lost’ tells the “emotionally charged” story of a girl who acts as protector of her sister, whose serious mental health problems cause consternation in a South African village. Her situation deteriorates as her care is entrusted to Nkunzi, a local man who employs traditional techniques to rid people of their demons.

Jarrett-Macauley said: “The winning story explores a difficult subject – how traditional beliefs in a rural community are used to tackle schizophrenia. This is a troubling piece, depicting the great love between two young siblings in a beautifully drawn Eastern Cape. Multi-layered, and gracefully narrated, this short story leaves the reader full of sympathy and wonder at the plight of its protagonists”.

Lidudumalingani is a writer, filmmaker and photographer. He was born in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, in a village called Zikhovane. Lidudumalingani has published short stories, non-fiction and criticism in various publications.

He was joined on the 2016 shortlist by Lesley Nneka Arimah from Nigeria for ‘What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky’ published in Catapult (Catapult); Tope Folarin from Nigeria for ‘Genesis’ published in Callaloo (Johns Hopkins University Press), Bongani Kona from Zimbabwe for ‘At Your Requiem’ published in Incredible Journey: Stories That Move You (Burnet Media) and Abdul Adan from Somalia/Kenya for ‘The Lifebloom Gift’ published in The Gonjon Pin and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2014 (New Internationalist). Each shortlisted writer will receive £500.

Joining Jarrett-Macauley on the judging panel were actor Adjoa Andoh; writer and founder of Storymoja Festival, Muthoni Garland; associate professor and director of African American Studies at Georgetown Univeristy, Dr Robert J Patterson; and South African writer and 2006 Caine Prize winner, Mary Watson.

‘Memories We Lost’ is available to read here .

Repost from www.thebookseller.com

Caine Prize for African Writing
Lidudumalingani
Literary Awards
Memories We Lost
Short Stories

NAACP Image Awards Literary Winners

2016 National Book Award Winners

2017 PEN America Debut Fiction Literary Award Finalists

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A Guide to Memories We Lost and other stories

This guide provides a detailed analysis of the anthology of Memories we lost and other stories compiled by Chris Wanjala.The analysis is aimed at preparing KCSE candidates for both the excerpt as well as the compulsory essay questions in the examination.Furthermore, the guide is written in a manner that both the candidates and teachers will immensely benefit from it.

Description

This guide provides a detailed analysis of the anthology of Memories we lost and other stories compiled by Chris Wanjala.

The guide covers the following:

Introduction to short stories

A Brief History of the Author

The setting

The relevance of the title.

Chapter summaries & analysis

Character and characterization

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The most featured work is ‘Memories We Lost’ by a South African Author, Lidudumalingani. The short story was nominated for and won The Caine Prize for African Fiction 2016. It is about challenges brought by mental illness to the victim and those around them. The mental illness is schizophrenia. Other issues it addresses superstition, ignorance, love, a few but to mention.

‘Memories We Lost’ is a biography. The life of a sister seen by a younger sister who acts as protector of her sister, whose serious mental health problems cause consternation in a South African village. The illnesses is first described as this thing that takes the narrator’s younger sister. Over time it robs the sister of the ability to speak and remember hence the title Memories We lost. The title is a reflection of loss and regret.

The narrator shows sisterly love and cares for the sick sister really well. They always played and worked together in all circumstances. Their mother too demonstrated love and she did whatever she can to have her daughter healed of “the thing”. Like any good mother, she had made many attempts to have the girl cured.. She had used herbs, modern medication, prayers and even consulted local medicine men – witchdoctors. An example is Nkunzi, a local man who employed traditional techniques to rid people of their demons. But the sick sister situation deteriorated as her care is entrusted to Nkunzi.The narrator opposed the practices of Nkunzi and for that sake the two decided to escape from their home village in the middle of the of one night.

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· Challenges faced by the sick (mentally ill) and their families. · Caring/Showing compassion and love for the sick in our midst.

· Running out to the fields in the middle of the night (P 10) · The head injury (P 11) · The hot porridge (P 12) · The incident in class (P 13) · Games in the rain (P 14) · The ritual (P 14) · Father’s departure (P 15) · Milking the goat (P 15) · The escape (P 17)

The twelve year old narrator gives us insights of living with a patient struggling with schizophrenia-a mental disorder without cure. We should accept challenges and offer compassion and care for the patient

The story is set in South Africa where the villagers wallow in ignorance. They refer to the illness as “the thing”. It appears and disappears like ghosts. The narrator prays to God and ancestors to help her sister.

Schizophrenia impairs the speech and memory of the patient.

One day the patient runs away from home. All the villagers wake up in the middle of the night to help look for her. They organize disoriented search parties that comb the murky village in search for her. After a long unfruitful search, they return feeling defeated. The narrator’s mother does not return until she finds her daughter.

“She would scream at intervals as is to taunt me” (pg 11)

At other times, she would inflict injury on herself. She bangs her head against a wall until she bleeds. The narrator wishes she would inflict injury on herself. The narrator wishes she would stop this thing with horns, spikes and oversized head. She imagines the pain of knowing a monster is coming for you but you can’t run. The patient bangs her head until she cracks the old mud wall and leaves blood on it. A ‘sangoma’ (traditional healer) is called to cleanse the spot.

In November it was worse. It causes the patient to drop out of school and disrupts the narrator’s education. One day at school the patient smashes a window using a desk and breaks a chair against a wall. She also screams bringing learning activities to a standstill. The sight of her sister calms her down.

She is forced to drop out of school. Her sister feigns illness in order to skip school and be with her. She stays at home until her sick sister begs her to go to school.

Since people are ignorant about schizophrenia. The patient is given tons of needless medication, taken to sangomas and churches for impotent healing and prayers.

The patient stays away from school for very long time that her sister who is three years younger than her catches up with her and goes two classes above.

Luckily her sister learns some facts about her condition- schizophrenia; a mental illness that has no cure. Since she cares for her sister, she insists that she deserves to feel something. The first step she takes is dumping the medicine and asking her sister to only pretend to take it.

The medication and other ignorant ‘remedies’ combined with the illness and has resulted to loss of speech. The patient is forced to use gestures and insert a few words while trying to communicate with her sister. She realizes that her sister needs love and compassion.

“I need no words”

Without the needless medication the patient could feel again. They even play in the rain; they began forming new childhood memories, filling the void left by the ones that had been wiped out. They laugh and jump but this worries their guileless mother.

The patient is subjected to many rituals that bear no fruit. Church sermons sangomas promise healing in a matter of time but these miracles have proven elusive. They even offer the ancestors sacrifice in terms of tobacco meat and matches which are only stolen by thieves. They stab a goat for blood and meat the villagers curse “the thing” and refer to it as the devils work and demons. They don’t ,however, care about the sick girl.

The girl’s father also had schizophrenia. He disappeared from home on a horse. His condition was kept a secret. The mystery surrounding this condition has made it difficult to control.

One morning, the narrator eavesdrops and overhears her mother telling her uncle that she (together with Smellyfoot) were making plans to take her sister to a Sangoma called Nkunzi who uses callous means to “cure" demon possessed people like her sister. He would make fire from cow dung and wood and ties a patient section of zinc roofing then would potentially kill the patient. The caring girl couldn’t allow this to happen to her sister.

That evening they run away from home. She tells her they are going to see a sick aunt. They go past a village (maybe philoni) and walk all night until they come to a hospital.

Surely such a patient only needs love, compassion and professional care by a doctor.

Main issues in Memories we Lost

· Problems/trials/obstacles of schizophrenia (mental illness) · Love, hope and care for the patient make life more bearable

Challenges experienced by schizophrenic patients

a) Loss of speech

· The first thing this thing took from us was speech; unfamiliar language, trembling words, relaying unthinkable revelations from the gods (p10) · Screaming words I did not understand, talking our own language, she only nodded and shook her head (p13) · She & I began to communicate again, we invented our own language, she had stopped talking, simply gestured to each other, inserted a few words here and there, connected by laughing, crying, holding hands (p14)

b) Loss of memory, consciousness, reality

· And then it took our memories; the memories faded one after the other until our past was a blur (p10) · she had transformed into someone else, she was not here, when she gained consciousness she was shocked and devastated, she began to recognise herself (p12)

c) Running away from home

· Screaming and running away from home, waking my mother and me, abducting the entire village, men, women and children (p10) · searched for hours, mother searched all night, returned the next day (p11) · The medications and rituals did not work, my mother said, my sister needed to go see Nkuzi, Nkuzi was a sangoma, baked people like my sister, tie demon-possessed person and placed them on a fire (p17) · I could not allow this to happen to my sister, after sunrise we left together, we were going to see a sick aunt (p17) · We had no idea where we were going to sleep, eat live; won’t return home, until mother dies, we were running away from home, the real story would destroy her, she had a mental disorder, walked all night – morning was close, could see modern buildings – hospital

d) Injury

· My sister banged her head against the wall until she bled (p11)

· always hoped that I could stop it (desperation), hitting the back of her head against the wall, tried to grab her, to make her stop, cracked the wall open with her head, left blood on the wall (p12)

· She threw hot porridge on me; abducted her, she flung the pot across the room, my chest was not that fortunate, the pain was unbearable, she was shocked & devastated when she regained consciousness, told her I had poured hot water on myself by mistake, she would never forgive herself (p12)

e) Education is interrupted

· It followed her to school & she had to drop out (p12);

· she was so strong, out of control, flung a desk, smashed a window, broke a chair against a wall, screaming words I did not understand, eyes turned red, entire body was shaking, I could see this thing leave, could see my sister returning, missed so much school over the years, I caught up with her, went two grades above her (p13)

· I went truant from school; every morning I threw up, convinced my mother I was sick, she asked a schoolmate to tell the class teacher I was sick, I want to be in the same class as you; mother, the teachers, the principal will never allow it, yes they will, spent a week doing sketches; she could sketch me, another me, more happy, less torn, existing elsewhere, she begged & begged me to go to school, my week of absence had gone unreported, this bothered neither my class teacher or me (p13)

f) The treatment

· My mother took my sister to more sangomas , more churches, gave her more bottles of medication, became unresponsive, only nodded & shook her head, the teacher told us about schizophrenia, this is what my sister had, medication she had been taking would never help her, it was destroying her (p13) · there was no cure, my sister deserved to feel something, got rid of her arsenal of medication, this is going to be our secret, we dug holes and buried the roots (p13) · Get rid of the medication drink, take an empty sip, throw it out the back window, poured her medication, took an empty sip, it was our game (p14) · she began to recognise herself, we began to communicate again, we invented our own language, she had stopped talking, we began to love each other again, we connected again; staring into the landscape, mountains, horizons, laughing, crying, holding hands (p14) · We jumped in the rain, my sister returned, she jumped, she laughed, we began to form new childhood memories, we lay on the wet ground, felt free (p14) · The medications and rituals did not work, my mother said (p17)

g) The rituals

· Village gathered outside our house, yet another ritual meant to cure my sister, been through many rituals & church sermons, nothing changed, sangomas and pastors promised that she would be healed within days, sangomas healing worked, tobacco, matches, meat left out for ancestors wasn’t there in the morning, they believed ancestors had healed her, this came again, the sacrifices had been stolen by thieves, women chatter and sing, men come in silence, children run around playing, everyone moved in a chaotic choreography (p14) · women gossiping about my sister, emotionless, tears rolled down our cheeks, goat stabbed in the stomach to summon ancestors, we came out of the house, hugged tightly, wiped tears, holding hands, fingers intertwined (p15) · villagers shouted insults at the thing, elders called it the devil's work & demons, none of them knew my sister, non of them cared (pg 15) · The medications and rituals did not work, my mother said (p17)

h) Ignorance

· Led to more suffering · There was never a forewarning that this thing was coming, came out of nowhere as ghosts, mumbled 2 short prayers; to God and ancestors, every time this thing took her she returned altered, unrecognisable, two people were trapped inside her (p10) · with horns, spikes, an oversized head – how I imagined it looked, a monster, a sangoma came and cleansed the spot (p12) · My mother took my sister to more sangomas , more churches, gave her more bottles of medication, became unresponsive, only nodded & shook her head, the teacher told us about schizophrenia, this is what my sister had, medication she had been taking would never help her, it was destroying her, there was no cure (p13) · She had been through all rituals, church sermons, sangomas , pastors, nothing changed (p14) · villagers shouted insults at the 'thing’, it remained unknown to them, elders called it the devil's work & demons, none of them knew my sister, none of them cared (pg 15) · The medications and rituals did not work, my mother said, my sister needed to go see Nkuzi, Nkuzi was a sangoma, baked people like my sister, tie demon-possessed person and placed them on a fire (p17)

i) Father disappeared, family separation

· Mother torn defeated, why God gave this thing to my sister and my father, father disappeared, it was a buried secret, left one day on a horse, never came back, it has been 20 years (p15)

· mother replaced our father and us with Smellyfoot (p17)

j) Nkuzi-sangoma

· “baking” people like my sister, Fire from cow dung and firewood, Tie down demon-possessed person to zinc roofing, placed on fire, no one lived after that, I couldn’t let this happen to my sister, ran away from home

Ignorance results is suffering

The sick girl suffers more because of the people’s lack of knowledge rather than her condition. The incomprehension about schizophrenia makes the patient suffer since the perceived remedies only compound her situation.

“ This thing” · The patient's sister calls the disease “this thing” · It came out of nowhere like ghosts do · Her primitive solution is mumbling two short prayers to God and the ancestors (Pg10) · She hopes she could see the thing, with a view of stopping it · She deems it a monster with horns, spikes and an oversized head (Pg12) · Villagers shout insults at the “thing” – it remains unknown to them · Elders erroneously refer to it as the devil’s work and demons Sangomas and Pastors · The people put too much faith in sangomas and pastors · A sangoma comes to cleanse the blood-stained spot where the patient had bludgeoned her head (Pg12) · The girl is taken to more sangomas and more churches (Pg13) · Sangomas and pastors promise she would be healed within days (Pg14) Medication · Apart from the visits to the sangomas and pastors, the patient is given many bottles of medication · This impuissant remedy makes her unresponsive · Her sister learns that she has schizophrenia – a condition without a cure · The medication would never help her – it is destroying her · Gets rid of the medication (Pg13) · She begins to recognise herself. The girls begin to communicate again (Pg14) · The medication does not work (Pg 17) Rituals · Conduct rituals supposedly to cure the girl · She has been through all rituals and church sermons but nothing had changes · Sangomas and pastors promise she would be healed within days · The elders once triumphantly hail sangoma's healing – the meat, tobacco and matches left out for the ancestors was not there in the morning. We later learn they were stolen by thieves when the thing returns · The rituals involve men, women and children (Pg14) · Women stand gossiping about the girl · The patient’s face becomes emotionless · The girl's mother tells a visiting uncle that the medication and rituals do not work (Pg17) Nkunzi · Mother plans to take the patient to Nkunzi, a sangoma from remote village, famous for “baking” people like the sick girl – claiming to cure them · He tied the demon-possessed person to a zinc roofing and placed it on a fire made from cow dung and wood · Claimed to be baking demons the demons – the patient would recover from the burns after a week · This callous procedure is potentially fatal (Pg17) · “I could not allow this to happen to my sister” · They run away from home

27 comments:

Thanks for the feedback.

Thank you for your great work

Welcome. Thanks for the feedback.

Very elaborate, it shows all the features of a good written work

Thanks for the feedback mwalimu.

I'm always looking forward to your analysis of these stories. They're quite helpful in teaching

Thanks for the feedback

Excellent work brother. Always looking forward to your works on literature

Thanks for the kind words brother.

I really appreciate and love your work Thank you so much God bless you mwalimu

Thanks for the warm message

I just love your works ..be it literature ,oral literature ...its amazing..it's really helping in my revision for KCSE.

Thanks for your feedback.

can you give an update on this question? "people with mental issues need love and support"

I will post a similiar question and answers soon.

Thank you so much Wekati for this guides I have benefited so much

Thanks for your comment

It is very clear...thanks for the good work

Excellent piece

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The best of both worlds; an anthology of stories for all ages McHargue, Georgess PN6120.2 .M34
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Memories we lost, and other stories : an anthology of short stories PN6120.2 .M446 2016
Micro fiction : an anthology of really short stories PN6120.2 .M48 1996
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Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning

Jonathan Lambert

A close-up of a woman's hand writing in a notebook.

If you're like many digitally savvy Americans, it has likely been a while since you've spent much time writing by hand.

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

But giving up this slower, more tactile way of expressing ourselves may come at a significant cost, according to a growing body of research that's uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults.

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In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

"There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam , a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

While those benefits have long been recognized by some (for instance, many authors, including Jennifer Egan and Neil Gaiman , draft their stories by hand to stoke creativity), scientists have only recently started investigating why writing by hand has these effects.

A slew of recent brain imaging research suggests handwriting's power stems from the relative complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together to reproduce the shapes of letters in our heads onto the page.

Your brain on handwriting

Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.

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"Handwriting is probably among the most complex motor skills that the brain is capable of," says Marieke Longcamp , a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université.

Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.

"Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter," says Sophia Vinci-Booher , an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it's formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters' shapes, says Vinci-Booher.

That's not true for typing.

To type "tap" your fingers don't have to trace out the form of the letters — they just make three relatively simple and uniform movements. In comparison, it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type.

Recent brain imaging studies bolster this idea. A study published in January found that when students write by hand, brain areas involved in motor and visual information processing " sync up " with areas crucial to memory formation, firing at frequencies associated with learning.

"We don't see that [synchronized activity] in typewriting at all," says Audrey van der Meer , a psychologist and study co-author at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She suggests that writing by hand is a neurobiologically richer process and that this richness may confer some cognitive benefits.

Other experts agree. "There seems to be something fundamental about engaging your body to produce these shapes," says Robert Wiley , a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "It lets you make associations between your body and what you're seeing and hearing," he says, which might give the mind more footholds for accessing a given concept or idea.

Those extra footholds are especially important for learning in kids, but they may give adults a leg up too. Wiley and others worry that ditching handwriting for typing could have serious consequences for how we all learn and think.

What might be lost as handwriting wanes

The clearest consequence of screens and keyboards replacing pen and paper might be on kids' ability to learn the building blocks of literacy — letters.

"Letter recognition in early childhood is actually one of the best predictors of later reading and math attainment," says Vinci-Booher. Her work suggests the process of learning to write letters by hand is crucial for learning to read them.

"When kids write letters, they're just messy," she says. As kids practice writing "A," each iteration is different, and that variability helps solidify their conceptual understanding of the letter.

Research suggests kids learn to recognize letters better when seeing variable handwritten examples, compared with uniform typed examples.

This helps develop areas of the brain used during reading in older children and adults, Vinci-Booher found.

"This could be one of the ways that early experiences actually translate to long-term life outcomes," she says. "These visually demanding, fine motor actions bake in neural communication patterns that are really important for learning later on."

Ditching handwriting instruction could mean that those skills don't get developed as well, which could impair kids' ability to learn down the road.

"If young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won't reach their full potential," says van der Meer. "It's scary to think of the potential consequences."

Many states are trying to avoid these risks by mandating cursive instruction. This year, California started requiring elementary school students to learn cursive , and similar bills are moving through state legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin. (So far, evidence suggests that it's the writing by hand that matters, not whether it's print or cursive.)

Slowing down and processing information

For adults, one of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down.

During a meeting or lecture, it's possible to type what you're hearing verbatim. But often, "you're not actually processing that information — you're just typing in the blind," says van der Meer. "If you take notes by hand, you can't write everything down," she says.

The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas, she says. "You make the information your own," she says, which helps it stick in the brain.

Such connections and integration are still possible when typing, but they need to be made more intentionally. And sometimes, efficiency wins out. "When you're writing a long essay, it's obviously much more practical to use a keyboard," says van der Meer.

Still, given our long history of using our hands to mark meaning in the world, some scientists worry about the more diffuse consequences of offloading our thinking to computers.

"We're foisting a lot of our knowledge, extending our cognition, to other devices, so it's only natural that we've started using these other agents to do our writing for us," says Balasubramaniam.

It's possible that this might free up our minds to do other kinds of hard thinking, he says. Or we might be sacrificing a fundamental process that's crucial for the kinds of immersive cognitive experiences that enable us to learn and think at our full potential.

Balasubramaniam stresses, however, that we don't have to ditch digital tools to harness the power of handwriting. So far, research suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as etching ink on paper. It's the movement that counts, he says, not its final form.

Jonathan Lambert is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers science, health and policy.

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These Are the Stories We Tell Ourselves

A personal perspective: how to shape our lives by creating the narrative..

Posted May 12, 2024 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

Understanding Grief
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Writing is power. We exercise our agency in the telling of our story.
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When my mother was in her 80s, she had a devastating stroke. The doctors told us—my brother, sister, and I—that she had no hope of recovering a meaningful life.

For weeks, we sat vigil by her bedside in the ICU hoping for a miracle that never came. On the sad day that we decided to withdraw life support, we brought our children (six grandchildren in all) to the hospital to say goodbye.

The nurses removed her breathing tube and we waited. Only soft sniffles and the occasional stifled sob broke the heavy silence. But our mother’s heart beat on.

We began telling each other stories of Mom and Grammy. My older siblings related their memories of the flood our home had weathered—an event that happened before I was born. The grandchildren recalled being taught how to play gin rummy or crotchet an afghan square or how to drop a stream of bubbling hot fudge into a cup of cold water to check for the soft ball stage of doneness.

We ordered a takeout lunch. Then takeout dinner. By 11 pm and more than twelve hours off the ventilator, it was clear to us that our mother was not going to die that day. Our original plan had been for all of us to be with her when she passed. But as the children started to get cranky or nod off, we made a new plan. One of us adult children would stay with her at all times until she passed. I was elected (or volunteered; I can’t remember which) to stay since I was the one in the medical field and also lived closest.

But as we bundled kids into coats and hugged each other goodbye, our mother’s heartbeat suddenly started to fall. To the 70s at first. Then 50s. Then 30s. We instinctively moved closer. We touched her shoulder, her face, her hair. We held hands with her and with each other. The sobs and sniffles that had filled the room before were gone. Now it was filled with only love.

How Our Stories Shape Our Truths

The story we tell ourselves is this: My mother wanted us all to be together with her as she passed. She enjoyed listening to our stories. She relished our laughter . She even appreciated the crabbiness of the little ones.

We tell ourselves that when plans changed to having only one of us nearby to see her to the other side, she changed plans herself, opting to make that journey sooner rather than later. We tell ourselves she took control and went peacefully.

This story comforts us in our grief . But the truth is I don’t know the truth. I don’t know if my mother suffered. I don’t know if she was ready to die. I don’t think she suffered, but I can’t know. All I have is this story I tell myself.

Writing to Find Meaning in Adversity

But this is the power and the beauty of narrative. By telling our own stories in our own way, we can take ownership of our experience.

Writing gives us a way of processing events, contextualizing interactions. It is not just the fact that something stressful happened to us or the fact that we bore witness to great suffering that causes us to suffer. It is our emotional reaction to it that must be considered on the page.

In writing about it, we come to see the meaning of these happenings (or more accurately, we extract our own meaning from them). Writing lets us take lessons learned with us as we move on. It also gives us the opportunity to leave behind on the page aspects of that account that no longer serve us well.

We are not simply re-writing history or searching for a happier ending when we write our truths. We are divining meaning for ourselves from difficult circumstances. Maybe in revisiting a painful event, we are able to see some value in adversity. Searching for the positive in the negative when we write can allow us to not only disengage from that negative experience but also to grow from it. Our writing helps us to take a step back from what is causing us stress or confusion and learn something useful from it.

Writing to Exercise Our Agency

Writing also gives us agency in our circumstances. Writing about the event gives us a certain power, not over the event itself—we cannot change that—but we can control the narrative. We can understand our place within that larger story and learn and grow from the experience moving forward.

Some years ago, I presented a writing workshop for healthcare professionals at a symposium at the University of Iowa’s Carver School of Medicine called The Examined Life conference. Nellie Hermann, the creative director of Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine program, was a fellow presenter. She had just written a novel called The Cure for Grief which was based on a true experience in her life.

After her presentation, an audience member asked her why she wrote her story as a novel instead of a memoir and more broadly, why she wrote in general. Her answer resonated deeply with me at the time and has stuck with me to this day. She said, “We write to have power over something we can never control… the past.” This is another rationale for reflective writing. The practice gives us control of the narrative.

In an example from my own life, when I wrote my first memoir Crash: A Mother, a Son, and Journey from Grief to Gratitude , I chose not to name the drunk driver. I felt that to name him would only serve to give him a level of humanity that I did not feel he deserved. It was a tiny literary decision—not to name a character—but it gave me a sovereignty I would not have had, had I not been a writer. In this way, writing is power.

Proust said, “Ideas come to us as the successors to grief and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure the heart; the transformation itself, even for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy.” Proust understood that processing our experiences with words releases some of the grief and loss we feel and, in some instances, brings its own solace to our hearts.

The story I tell myself about my mother’s death may be true. In fact, I think it is. But for me, the larger point is that writing about her death helped me to process the many feelings I had about it. Grief. Guilt . Regret.

The Nuts and Bolts of Cultivating a Daily Reflective Writing Practice

Cultivating a daily writing practice takes time. Give yourself about 30 minutes in a quiet place. Put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and just write with no thought to spelling, grammar, or punctuation.

Write whatever comes to mind, even if it is just “nothing is coming to mind.” It’s enough to loosen the wiring, to untangle the knots of thoughts in our over-worked minds.

Then just wonder on the page. Ask yourself questions. Give yourself a prompt. “I wonder” is a good one. “I wonder what would have happened if I’d told my friend how I really felt.” “I wonder why I didn’t.” Then just write.

Sometimes insights come during the writing session. You understand what was holding you back. You may even find a way forward with a vexing issue in a relationship. Sometimes that understanding comes later, as you read over your words, or as they just bump up against each other in your brain.

Writing may feel forced or difficult at first. You may think “This is stupid.” Or “What am I doing?” But with practice, you will more quickly settle into the place where words flow. Where connections are made. Solutions found. Permissions granted. Where the story you tell yourself becomes the story you knew to be true all along.

1. Pennebaker JW and Seagal JD. Forming a Story: The Health Benefits of Narrative. J Clinical Psych . 1999;55(10): 1243-1254.

2. Kaminer D. Healing processes in trauma narratives: a review. South African Journal of Psychology . 2006;36(3):481-499.

3. Lepore SJ and Smyth JM. The Writing Cure: How Expressive Writing Promotes Health and Emotional Well-Being. Washington DC. American Psychological Associates. 2002.

4. Westrate NM and Gluck J. Hard-earned wisdom: exploratory processing of difficult life experiences is positively associated with wisdom. Dev Psychol . 2017 Apr;53(4):800-814.

5. Proust M. Du Cote de Chez Swann. First volume of In Search of Lost Time . 1913.

Carolyn Roy-Bornstein, MD, is a retired pediatrician and the Writer-in-Residence at a large family medicine residency program where she leads physicians in narrative medicine workshops.

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Can Forgetting Help You Remember?

By Jerome Groopman

Four times a year, I attend the Yizkor service at synagogue. Yizkor in Hebrew denotes “remembrance,” and the official name of the service, Hazkarat Neshamot, means a “remembering of souls.” During the service, I call to mind loved ones who have died—parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, close friends—reliving shared times that were cherished, and some that were fraught. I think about what I learned from these people, several of whom were in my life from my first moments of awareness. I recall being taught to swim by my father, hearing my pious Russian grandmother’s tearful account of the Kishinev pogrom, standing by my father’s bedside as a medical student in an underequipped community hospital as he suffered a fatal heart attack. The Yizkor service at my synagogue ends with the Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, and with a call to perform deeds of loving-kindness in memory of the departed.

Many religions and cultures have rituals structured around remembrance, a fact that suggests how central the ability to remember is to our sense of self, both as individuals and as communities. But how accurate are our memories, and in what ways do they truly shape us? And why does some of what we remember come to us easily, even unbidden, while other things remain maddeningly just out of reach, seeming to slip even further away the more we struggle to summon them?

In “Why We Remember” (Doubleday), Charan Ranganath, a neuropsychologist at U.C. Davis, writes that the question he always gets when he mentions that he studies memory is “Why am I so forgetful?” The title of his book is a riposte to this, a suggestion that it’s the wrong question to be asking. “The problem isn’t your memory, it’s that we have the wrong expectations for what memory is for in the first place,” he writes. “The mechanisms of memory were not cobbled together to help us remember the name of that guy we met at that thing.”

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It has never been easier to fact-check our memories against an external record and find ourselves lacking, but Ranganath is intent on giving us a new way of understanding memory. He tracks how ideas about the phenomenon have developed in the course of more than a century of scientific inquiry, and lays out the state of current research. In common with many researchers studying cognition and behavior, he takes a broadly evolutionary view. “The various mechanisms that contribute to memory have evolved to meet the challenges of survival.” It’s easy enough to imagine how being able to retain knowledge about food sources or particular dangers could be lifesaving for our ancestors—“which berries were poisonous, which people were most likely to help or betray them,” as Ranganath puts it. But thinking of memory as an adaptive trait has a less obvious and perhaps more interesting corollary: “Viewed through this lens, it is apparent that what we often see as the flaws of memory are also its features.” In the right circumstances, apparently, forgetting has been useful, too.

The earliest scientist in Ranganath’s account is the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who, in the late nineteenth century, attempted to put the study of memory on an objective footing by quantifying its effects. Acting as his own experimental subject, he set about seeing how much data he could remember with a given amount of study. The test he used, chosen for its lack of prior associations, was a welter of meaningless three-letter syllables. Ebbinghaus found that he could memorize sixty-four of these pseudo-words in forty-five minutes before becoming exhausted. However, when he measured his retention, he observed that he had forgotten nearly half the words after twenty minutes. Graphing the rate at which information was lost, he came up with the so-called forgetting curve, a concept that is still influential—for instance, in the design of spaced-repetition learning tools. The forgetting curve starts out steep—a huge amount of information vanishes within sixty minutes—and levels off over several days. As Ranganath notes, “Much of what you are experiencing right now will be lost in less than a day.”

Ebbinghaus’s experiment drew a sharp line between remembering and forgetting, but, a generation later, Frederic Bartlett, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, showed that the situation is more complicated. Not only do we fail to remember much of what happens to us; even things we remember are often wrong. In a famous experiment, volunteers were told a Native American folk tale called “War of the Ghosts,” selected because it contained cultural details that would be alien to British students. Later, the students recalled the core of the tale but replaced some details with more culturally familiar ones. Instead of words such as “canoe” and “paddle,” they recalled “boat” and “oar”; they replaced “seal hunting” with “fishing.”

From these results, Bartlett concluded that memories are not a simple record of the past but, rather, an “imaginative reconstruction,” in which retrieved information is fleshed out with preëxisting knowledge to compose a story that feels coherent to us. With repeated acts of recall, Ranganath later writes, further alterations creep in, making the memory “like a copy of a copy of a copy, increasingly blurry and susceptible to distortions.” Subsequent research has borne out Bartlett’s insight about the imaginative nature of memory, showing that the neural circuits associated with imagination are active during the act of remembering. Ranganath guides us through the roles of various brain regions, particularly the hippocampus and parts of the prefrontal cortex, and describes some research of his own, which has helped demonstrate the role of the perirhinal cortex in imparting a sense of familiarity. (Notably, this sense can sometimes be triggered even when we are presented with something unfamiliar, leading us to experience déjà vu.)

The picture that emerges is one in which what we call “memory” is less a single thing than a web of interrelated functions. Emotion plays a significant role, particularly in the retrieval of “episodic memories.” The term was used in 1972 by an Estonian-born Canadian psychologist named Endel Tulving, who drew a distinction between two kinds of memory, episodic and semantic. Episodic memory happens when we recall experiences. Semantic memory is the retrieval of discrete facts or knowledge that isn’t reliant on summoning the experiential context in which the information was learned. Tulving wrote that episodic memory amounted to a form of “mental time travel,” as we enter a state of consciousness similar to the one we were in when the memories were stored.

Marcel Proust’s episodic memory, famously, was triggered by the smell of madeleines. Taste can function in a similar way and, as Ranganath writes, so can music. He also speculates that nostalgia has its roots in episodic memory. According to him, research shows that, on average, people find it easier to recollect positive rather than negative memories, and this bias increases as we age. He even thinks that this “might explain older adults’ penchant for nostalgia.” But I wonder, too, whether nostalgia might have to do with the vicissitudes of the aging process, which may prompt us to recall wistfully the vitality of youth rather than the onset of arthritis in our hips or the formation of cataracts.

How can such an apparently haphazard system confer an advantage on us as a species? The answer starts to come into focus when Ranganath writes about attempts to make certain machine-learning models simulate the way that human brains learn. As information is fed in, the model gradually builds up a body of knowledge about a given area. Ranganath provides a hypothetical example:

“An eagle is a bird. It has feathers, wings, and a beak, and it flies.” “A crow is a bird. It has feathers, wings, and a beak, and it flies.” “A hawk is a bird. It has feathers, wings, and a beak, and it flies.”

Soon, he explains, the system will be able to use the examples it has been taught to deduce that a seagull, say, can fly. But it has problems making sense of information that doesn’t fit the pattern, such as “A penguin is a bird. It has feathers, wings, and a beak, and it swims .” Exceptions to the rule can cause what is known as “catastrophic interference,” in which learning the new piece of information causes the model to forget what it had previously learned. Overcoming this weakness requires training the computer on colossal amounts of data.

People, by contrast, take such contradictions in stride, something that Ranganath attributes to our ability to toggle between semantic and episodic memory. The general rule is stored in semantic memory, whereas episodic memory, not being designed to draw universals from across our experience, organizes events in a more idiosyncratic manner. The result is that our brains are much quicker to adjust to the real world. “They are wonderfully adapted to make use of the past, given the dynamic and unpredictable world in which we have evolved,” Ranganath writes. “The world around us is constantly changing, and it’s critical to update our memories to reflect these changes.”

Once we see memory as a dynamic phenomenon, rather than as a passive record, it becomes possible to understand how forgetting can also serve a purpose. “Forgetting isn’t a failure of memory; it’s a consequence of processes that allow our brains to prioritize information that helps us navigate and make sense of the world,” Ranganath writes. (It’s when we forget the wrong things, of course, that we get frustrated.) In certain circumstances, forgetting can even be part of the memorization process, and Ranganath spends a good deal of time on the power of “error-driven learning.” It seems that pushing our memory to failure can produce exactly the sort of salient experience that will then fix a piece of information in our mind.

Ranganath quotes Bartlett to the effect that “literal recall is extraordinarily unimportant” and makes clear that his book is “not a book about ‘how to remember everything.’ ’’ Nonetheless, an account of how memory works can hardly avoid giving a few tips. He advises us to think of our memories as “like a desk cluttered with crumpled-up scraps of paper. If you’d scribbled your online banking password on one of those scraps of paper, it will take a good deal of effort and luck to find it.” The key is to attach important memories to something distinctive, the equivalent of a “hot-pink Post-It note.” A related strategy is the memory-palace technique, in which one visualizes units of information as being arranged in a space that is already familiar, such as one’s childhood bedroom.

Perhaps the most useful tactic in memorization is “chunking,” a phenomenon identified by the pioneering mid-century cognitive psychologist George A. Miller. Miller noted how hard it was for us to hold more than a few pieces of information in our head simultaneously; he thought that it was impossible to keep more than seven things in mind at once, but subsequent research suggests that the situation is even worse and that the maximum is probably even lower. Fortunately, there’s what Ranganath calls a “huge loophole”: our brains are very flexible about what constitutes a single piece of information. A simple example is the way we remember telephone numbers. Breaking a ten-digit U.S. phone number into two groups of three plus a group of four reduces the number of “items” to be remembered from ten to three. At a larger scale, the most talented soccer or basketball players are able to “read” complicated arrangements of other players as single pieces of information. Likewise, many chess masters can take in the places of pieces on a board at a glance, because they are remembering not individual pieces on individual squares but larger patterns, based on their accumulated knowledge of the game. Tellingly, if the pieces are arranged randomly rather than having arisen out of actual gameplay, a chess master’s advantage in memorizing the position is dramatically reduced.

Toward the end of his book, Ranganath expands his focus from the individual to examine the social aspect of memory. He cites a startling analysis of casual conversation which found that forty per cent of the time we spend talking to one another is taken up with storytelling of some kind. Whether spilling our entire past or just quickly catching up, we are essentially engaged in exchanging memories. It should come as no surprise that communication renders our memories even more fungible. “The very act of sharing our past experiences can significantly change what we remember and the meaning we derive from it,” Ranganath writes, and distortions multiply with each telling.

Another pioneering experiment by Frederic Bartlett examined the distortions that occur in “serial reproduction”—or what we would call a game of telephone. Bartlett showed student volunteers a drawing of an African shield and then had them redraw it from memory. He gave these drawings to another group of volunteers and asked the fresh volunteers to reproduce the new drawings from memory. As he repeated the process with group after group, he found not only that the results looked less and less like an African shield but also that they started to resemble a man’s face. Collectively, the volunteers were changing something unfamiliar into something familiar. More recent work on such serial distortions has shown that, over several iterations, elements of a story that fit common stereotypes get reinforced and elements that don’t fall away.

The psychologist Henry L. Roediger III has adopted the term “social contagion” to describe such memory distortions. He conducted an experiment in which pairs of people were given a set of photos and asked to recall what they remembered from the pictures. However, only one individual in each pair was a true volunteer; the other had been planted with instructions to deliberately “recall” things that were not in the photos. The actual volunteers became “infected” by the misinformation, often themselves remembering items that hadn’t been in the pictures at all. Furthermore, the effect persisted even if they were warned of the possibility that their partner’s recollections might be mistaken.

Our openness to influence and the tendency of serial reproduction to magnify social biases have dispiriting political implications. “Once distortions creep into our shared narratives, they can be incredibly difficult to root out,” Ranganath writes. It’s no wonder that conspiracy theories—about the 2020 election being stolen, about Barack Obama being born in Kenya—prove so resistant to repeated debunking. It also turns out that groups are disproportionately swayed by dominant members who speak confidently. Ranganath offers a crumb of comfort. Research shows that diverse groups remember more accurately than homogenous ones do, and that groups also remember more fully if a wide range of group members contribute to discussion and if contributions from less powerful members are actively encouraged.

The term “collective memory” was established not by a psychologist but by the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, in a book published in 1925. Halbwachs saw shared memories as a key factor in group identity and explored how the same events might be recalled differently by people of different social classes or different religions. (As it happens, he converted from Catholicism to Judaism, and died in Buchenwald; some of his work on memory was published posthumously.) When I call to mind my forebears during the Yizkor service, I am enacting a sense of my place within my immediate family, the wider Jewish community, the medical profession, and American society as a whole. “We come to terms with the past in order to make sense of the present,” Ranganath writes, and memory shapes “everything from our perceptions of reality to the choices and plans we make, to the people we interact with, and even to our identity.”

This is true—in part. But certain past experiences, especially those of early childhood, shape us even though they are not quite remembered and instead reside in what we call the subconscious. Our memories certainly contribute to our identities, but so does their silent counterpart, the huge subliminal substrate of everything that we have forgotten. To attribute all that we are to memory bypasses what is forgotten but not lost. ♦

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Read Only Memories: Neurodiver review: Existential Bubblegum Crises

Many years in the making, Neurodiver looks at the Read Only Memories world from a new angle.

Read Only Memories: Neurodiver is a long-awaited sequel to 2015’s 2064: Read Only Memories, announced all the way back in 2019. It’s a visual novel with a colorful style, combining shades of nostalgic “vaporwave” coloring with the UI and structure of visual novels and dating sims from Japanese PC-8800 computers. It’s like a mix between the likes of Snatcher and Bubblegum Crisis, but with a distinctly contemporary cadence. And much like a classic anime OVA of the era being invoked here, the story can be devoured in an afternoon or two. I loved it!

Oh I get it, ES88 sounds like that computer thing

ES88 is an Esper, a human born with psychic powers. She works for MINERVA, a corporation that works with Espers to both help them control their powers and use them for unmatchable information technology services. ES88 is a big deal because she’s paired up with the Neurodiver, the world’s first synthetic Esper. This little, tentacled creature is carried around in a portable aquarium, makes adorable “blorp” noises, and amplifies ES88’s powers so much she can dive into and tangibly interact with people’s memories.

This experimental and ethically dubious technology is quickly put to the test when it’s discovered a criminal Esper called Golden Butterfly is on the loose, inhabiting civilian minds and corrupting their memories in the process. ES88 draws Golden’s ire as she’s helping a victim, effectively drawing a big target on her own back. Of course it’s way more complicated than that, and as the story develops we learn how personal the conflict truly is.

Ultimately, this review is gonna be my take on this story. And at the end of the day the story is quite simple, and in some ways disappointing. But it’s only disappointing as a side effect of the overall quality of Neurodiver’s writing. What a tangle! The game’s biggest strengths are in its world and characters, both of which are full of life, personality, and intriguing minutia. I definitely want to go back to 2064 to see where the foundation is laid, because even without prior context I had a great time meeting a bunch of weirdos and diving through their memories. An excellent voice acting cast and well-animated and expressive character dialogue portraits go the extra mile in making ROM a compelling world to explore.

Too much potential?

The problem is the plot itself felt fairly shallow. There were threads and ideas and hints at more interesting parts of this world spread throughout the story that ultimately never served a stronger purpose than background noise. I was actually surprised when Neurodiver wrapped up because it felt like things were still being set up, before the “A Plot” escalated and resolved pretty much within the same chapter. I left feeling unsatisfied and wanting a lot more, which I guess would make news of another sequel pretty welcome! But more meat on this particular bone would’ve gone a long way.

Not long ago, I previewed Neurodiver for Shacknews , having the chance to play a substantial chunk of the game ahead of the review period. I was able to pick up right where I left off, and in the end many of my initial thoughts carry all the way through. In short, I appreciate how streamlined Neurodiver is as an experience.

It doesn’t feel ashamed to be a visual novel, having plenty of confidence in its story and characters without dumping arbitrary puzzles all over the place just to be a “real” video game. If anything, the light puzzle elements that are in place are the worst part of the game.

Did we really need the puzzles though?

I mentioned two issues in the preview, and one of them (pixel hunting) thankfully didn’t persist. It was a literal one-time bump in the road, and it was nice to not run into a second time. The other issue did pop up a bit more, and at one point was actually quite frustrating.

When puzzles do show up, it’s when ES88 has to repair a corrupted memory. Clues you gather previously are slotted into a corruption and if you pick the right ones, mission accomplished. But if you pick the wrong ones you get a simple “whoops, try again” sort of prompt and that’s it! Normally it’s not a problem but occasionally you have way more clues than slots, and unless I’m the most oblivious fool on the planet there’s no further feedback or even helpful context to narrow down the options. It’s super trial and error and grinds the story to a halt unless you magically pick the right answers the first time. Ultimately this isn’t even that big of a deal, but Neurodiver is so breezy otherwise it makes these moments stand out more than they may have in another context.

Despite the snags I’ve mentioned, I’m still thinking about Read Only Memories: Neurodiver well after I finished the story. It’s such a pitch-perfect execution on its premise, mixing the worlds of modern cyberpunk with ancient PC technology and western anime fandom. I had a blast spending several hours with these characters and the world they inhabit, and would gladly have spent several hours more. A little more narrative depth and some puzzle guardrails and we’d have a true all-timer on our hands. But as it is, Neurodiver still stands out as a dope slice of niche gaming in a month stupidly crowded with that kind of thing.

Read Only Memories: Neurodiver is available on May 16, 2024 for the Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5. A PC code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.

Read Only Memories: Neurodiver
Compelling world and lovable characters
Nails its aesthetic mix of homage and distinct personality
Visual novel that sticks to its guns as a medium
Story ends a little early and doesn't utilize all its interesting ideas
Annoying puzzle structure rears its head a couple times

Lucas White posted a new article, Read Only Memories: Neurodiver review: Existential Bubblegum Crises

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GOP advances Garland contempt charges after White House exerts executive privilege over Biden audio

The White House has blocked the release of audio from President Joe Biden’s interview with a special counsel about his handling of classified documents, arguing Thursday that Republicans in Congress only wanted the recordings “to chop them up” and use them for political purposes.

Two House committees moved ahead with contempt charges against Attorney General Merrick Garland for refusing to turn over audio from Pres. Biden’s interview with a special counsel, after the White House’s decision to block release of the recording.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, speaks during the House Judiciary Committee markup hearing to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, Thursday, May 16, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

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FILE - Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks during the 36th Annual Candlelight Vigil to honor the law enforcement officers who lost their lives in 2023, in Washington, on May 13, 2024. House Republicans are set to advance contempt of Congress charges against Garland for his refusal to turn over unredacted audio of a special counsel interview with President Joe Biden. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

President Joe Biden, right, sitting next to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, left, speaks at the beginning of his meeting with the Combatant Commanders in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, May 15, 2024, before hosting them for a dinner. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

President Joe Biden speaks at a memorial service to honor law enforcement officers who’ve lost their lives in the past year, during National Police Week ceremonies at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, May 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., speaks during the House Judiciary Committee markup hearing to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, Thursday, May 16, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., speaks during the House Judiciary Committee markup hearing to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, Thursday, May 16, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., speaks during the House Judiciary Committee markup hearing to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, Thursday, May 16, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., speaks during the House Judiciary Committee markup hearing to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, Thursday, May 16, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two House committees moved ahead Thursday with contempt charges against Attorney General Merrick Garland for refusing to turn over audio from President Joe Biden’s interview with a special counsel , advancing the matter after the White House’s decision to block the release of the recording earlier in the day.

In back-to-back hearings that nearly spilled into early Friday, the House Judiciary and Oversight and Accountability committees voted along party lines to advance an effort to hold Garland in contempt of Congress for not turning over the records. But the timing of any action by the full House, and the willingness of the U.S. attorney’s office to act on the referral, remained uncertain.

“The department has a legal obligation to turn over the requested materials pursuant to the subpoena,” Rep. Jim Jordan, the GOP chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said during the hearing. “Attorney General Garland’s willful refusal to comply with our subpoena constitutes contempt of Congress.”

The rapid sequence of events Thursday further inflamed tensions between House Republicans and the Justice Department, setting the stage for another round of bitter fighting between the two branches of government that seemed nearly certain to spill over into court.

In this combination photo, President Joe Biden speaks May 2, 2024, in Wilmington, N.C., left, and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally, May 1, 2024, in Waukesha, Wis. (AP Photo)

If House Republicans’ efforts against Garland are successful, he will become the third attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress. The White House slammed Republicans in a letter earlier Thursday, dismissing their efforts to obtain the audio as purely political.

“The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal — to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes,” White House counsel Ed Siskel wrote in a scathing letter to House Republicans ahead of scheduled votes by the two House committees to refer Garland to the Justice Department for the contempt charges.

“Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally-protected law enforcement materials from the Executive Branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate,” Siskel added.

Garland separately advised Biden in a letter made public Thursday that the audio falls within the scope of executive privilege, which protects a president’s ability to obtain candid counsel from his advisers without fear of immediate public disclosure and to protect confidential communications relating to official responsibilities.

The attorney general told reporters that the Justice Department has gone to extraordinary lengths to provide information to the committees about special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation, including a transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur. But, Garland said, releasing the audio could jeopardize future sensitive and high-profile investigations. Officials have suggested handing over the tape could make future witnesses concerned about cooperating with investigators.

AP AUDIO: White House blocks release of Biden’s special counsel interview audio, says GOP is being political

Speaking with reporters, Attorney General Merrick Garland says the audio from President Biden’s special counsel interview that Republicans have requested will not be released.

“There have been a series of unprecedented and frankly unfounded attacks on the Justice Department,” Garland said. “This request, this effort to use contempt as a method of obtaining our sensitive law enforcement files is just most recent.”

The Justice Department warned Congress that a contempt effort would create “unnecessary and unwarranted conflict,” with Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte saying, “It is the longstanding position of the executive branch held by administrations of both parties that an official who asserts the president’s claim of executive privilege cannot be held in contempt of Congress.”

Siskel’s letter to lawmakers comes after the uproar from Biden’s aides and allies over Hur’s comments about Biden’s age and mental acuity, and it highlights concerns in a difficult election year over how potentially embarrassing moments from the lengthy interview could be exacerbated by the release, or selective release, of the audio.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson slammed the White House’s move, accusing Biden of suppressing the tape because he’s afraid to have voters hear it during an election year.

“The American people will not be able to hear why prosecutors felt the President of the United States was, in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s own words, an ‘elderly man with a poor memory,’ and thus shouldn’t be charged,” Johnson said the during a press conference on the House steps.

House Democrats defended Biden’s rationale during the back-to-back hearings on Thursday, citing the massive trove of documents and witnesses who have been made available to Republicans as part of their more than yearlong probe into Biden and his family.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said on Thursday that Republicans want to make it seem like they’ve uncovered wrongdoing by the Justice Department.

“In reality, the Attorney General and DOJ have been fully responsive to this committee in every way that might be material to their long dead impeachment inquiry,” the New York lawmaker said. “Sometimes, they have been too responsive, in my opinion, given the obvious bad faith of the MAGA majority.”

The contempt effort is seen by Democrats as a last-ditch effort to keep Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into Biden alive, despite a series of setbacks in recent months and flailing support for articles of impeachment within the GOP conference.

A transcript of the Hur interview showed Biden struggling to recall some dates and occasionally confusing some details — something longtime aides say he’s done for years in both public and private — but otherwise showing deep recall in other areas. Biden and his aides are particularly sensitive to questions about his age. At 81, he’s the oldest-ever president , and he’s seeking another four-year term.

At a news conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson says the American people will not get to hear the president’s special counsel interview.

Hur, a former senior official in the Trump administration Justice Department , was appointed as a special counsel in January 2023 following the discovery of classified documents in multiple locations tied to Biden.

Hur’s report said many of the documents recovered at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, in parts of Biden’s Delaware home, and in his Senate papers at the University of Delaware were retained by “mistake.”

However, investigators did find evidence of willful retention and disclosure related to a subset of records found in Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, house, including in a garage, an office and a basement den.

The files pertain to a troop surge in Afghanistan during the Obama administration that Biden had vigorously opposed. Biden kept records that documented his position, including a classified letter to Obama during the 2009 Thanksgiving holiday. Some of that information was shared with a ghostwriter with whom he published memoirs in 2007 and 2017.

Associated Press reporters Zeke Miller and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed.

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After Debris Removal, Lahaina Fire Survivor Left With Blank Slate For Future Home

Mario Siatris views the hauling away of fire debris on his property as forward momentum in a drawn-out recovery process.

Under blue skies, Mario Siatris watched a bulldozer and workers in disposable coveralls clear what little was left of his fire-scorched home.

Bricks. Cement walls. Appliance parts. Warped metal. The top six inches of soil, which pose a potential health threat from contaminants unleashed onto the landscape during the ferocious Lahaina wildfire Aug. 8.

All of it dropped into a dumpster and hauled off to a landfill built to safeguard the public from hazardous fire debris.

Mario Siatris, U’i Kahue-Cabanting, Camille Siatris, Anthony Fernandez, Bryson Siatris, Aziah Fernandez and Devin Siatris return to their home Monday, Nov. 13, 2023, in Lahaina. Their homes and neighborhood were destroyed in the Aug. 8 fire. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2023)

When the work was done, only bare dirt, covered in a layer of gravel to prevent soil erosion, remained.

Mario’s neighbors had warned him about the grief he might feel seeing his century-old homestead reduced to raw land. But in his mind, the removal of so much rubble marked another small step forward in his personal recovery from the nation’s deadliest modern day wildfire.

“I don’t know if it’s just being numb and wanting to go forward,” Mario explained a few days later. “A lot of people talked about how bad they felt and they cried for all the life that was there that’s been lost, all of the memories. I never had that feeling.”

In a matter of days, Mario expects to receive test results from soil samples excavated from his lot during the three-day debris removal process. If the soil is deemed safe, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will hand his property back over to the jurisdiction of Maui County.

At that point, Mario still won’t be able to live on his property, not even in the trailer he and his business partner U‘i Kahue-Cabanting plan to ship from Oregon to Maui.

Government leaders have said landowners won’t be permitted to live on their lots again until Lahaina’s fire-damaged water and sewer systems have been rehabilitated. There’s still no official timeline for that work to be completed.

“The hardest thing is waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting,” Mario says.

But having his lot officially rid of debris and hazards will allow Mario to move ahead with building and permitting. Mario’s eyeing a five-bedroom package home by Honsador Lumber that would allow him and his two adult children to have space and privacy for their three separate households while living under one roof.

It would cost about $900,000 to build. Mario anticipates he’ll receive about a half-million dollars in insurance money for the loss of his home, plus another $160,000 or so to cover the value of his furniture and other belongings.

He’ll need to come up with another $200,000, at least, to afford the home he’s aiming for and he’s not sure how he’ll manage to do it.

“When I’m gone, I want to leave my kids a nice house but I don’t want to leave them something they have to pay for,” Mario says. “Even if it works out to $1,000 a month for them each, that’s $1,000 they could be using to make ends meet. To stay in Hawaii, it seems like you’ve got to be debt-free.”

Mario is still living in a government-sponsored condominium at the resort where he works as a landscaper. He’s still struggling with the reality of working and living on the same property, although he’s grateful for a place to stay while he awaits the government’s go-ahead to reconstruct his home.

Recently, Mario spent a Saturday night sleeping in the bed of his truck under the stars at Puamana Beach Park.

He hadn’t been camping since before the fire. But he used to camp on the beach about once a month, weaving coconut bowls, fishing, catching waves, brewing campfire coffee at dawn and drinking a couple of Heinekens at night.

He loved the simplicity of it all, how he felt more connected with nature.

This camping experience was different. Instead of being liberated, Mario felt uncomfortable.

His mind raced with a string of thoughts: “I should go back to the hotel, back to the air conditioning. Can I do this? It’s been so long since I’ve done this.”

Mario almost jumped into the driver’s seat and drove away from the lull of crashing waves. But he forced himself to stay. When he woke up before dawn the next day, he felt calm and refreshed.

“A simple thing like that, it kind of reset everything,” Mario explained a few days later.

“People have $2 million homes with beautiful kitchens, beautiful things,” he continued. “What do they do on the weekend? They want to go camping. I used to crack up at that, I never understand. Now I think I get it. It kind of changed my perspective. Like, I can do this, I can keep going.”

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by grants from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.

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Not Guilty: Ex-Honolulu Prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro, Businessman Dennis Mitsunaga And Others Walk In Bribery Case

After Debris Removal, Lahaina Fire Survivor Left With Blank Slate For Future Home

Maui Wildfire Insurance Losses Estimated At $3 Billion So Far

Ben Lowenthal: Hawaii Just Won’t Give Up Its Harsh Civil Asset Forfeiture Laws

Catherine Toth Fox: Travel —And Spend — Wisely When Going To Maui

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Exclusion of Jewish Jurors Prompts Review of California Death Row Cases

Dozens of cases are under review after notes from jury selection in a 1990s murder case indicated that prosecutors worked to exclude Jews.

A light gray masonry courthouse building with tall vertical stripes of windows stands on a street corner.

By Tim Arango

A jury was being chosen for a murder trial nearly three decades ago in California. The state was seeking a death sentence for Ernest Dykes, who had been charged with killing a 9-year-old boy during a robbery in Oakland.

Weighing who should be struck from the jury pool and who should be kept, a prosecutor made notes about a prospective juror:

“I liked him better than any other Jew but no way.”

Other notes about prospective jurors bore evidence of similar prejudice:

“Banker. Jew?” read one.

“Jew? Yes,” read another.

The notes — just handwritten scribbles — were discovered recently in an internal case file from the 1990s when Mr. Dykes was convicted of murder and sent to death row. A federal judge who is overseeing settlement talks as part of an appeal by Mr. Dykes told the Alameda County District Attorney’s office to conduct a top-to-bottom search for any additional documents, and that search turned up the notes, which are now in the hands of the judge.

The notes offered a startling glimpse into a practice that some defense lawyers long suspected was going on, and that a former prosecutor had alleged was common in Alameda County — prosecutors seeking to exclude people of certain faiths, races or genders.

Now, Mr. Dykes, 51, and perhaps others on death row in California as well, may have their convictions tossed out and be granted new trials. The federal judge weighing his appeal has ordered a review of all California capital cases in which a defendant from Alameda County is still on death row. The county includes Oakland, Berkeley and a host of other Bay Area communities.

The inquiry, which may involve as many as 35 cases from as far back as 1977, is just getting underway. But the district attorney’s office says it has already found evidence that the discriminatory practice was widespread for decades and involved numerous prosecutors.

“When you intentionally exclude people based on their race, their religion, their gender or any protected category, it violates the Constitution,” said Pamela Price, the Alameda district attorney and a former civil rights lawyer.

Legal scholars and critics of the death penalty say some prosecutors have long sought to exclude certain groups from serving as jurors in capital cases, even after the courts made clear that the practice was unconstitutional. Given the long history of racial injustice in the United States, Black jurors were presumed to be sympathetic to defendants, especially to Black defendants. And in the decades after the Holocaust, Jews were presumed to be against capital punishment.

A team of prosecutors worked on the Dykes case, and the district attorney’s office said it has not been able to determine exactly who wrote the notes about prospective Jewish jurors.

The lead prosecutor in the case, Colton Carmine, is retired. Reached in Reno, Nev., where he now lives, Mr. Carmine declined to discuss the revelations about jury selection in the Dykes trial.

Ms. Price’s office has been contacting surviving relatives of the victims in the murder cases that are under review, to prepare them for the possibility of new trials and the prospect of reliving the trauma of having lost a loved one so violently.

Retrying the cases would present prosecutors with numerous challenges, like tracking down old case files and witnesses whose memories may have faded, or who have died.

Ms. Price, a former civil rights lawyer who is facing a recall election organized by critics who favor more punitive measures, said her office has reached about half the victims’ families so far. “Obviously people are not happy to hear from us after 20, sometimes 30 years, that the case is not over,” she said.

Lance Clark, the 9-year-old boy Mr. Dykes was convicted of killing, wanted to be an architect, and was “so smart, so bright,” said an uncle, Steve Robello. “He made his own toys. He made his own robots.” Just this week, he said, he visited his nephew’s grave and left flowers.

Kirstie Trias, Lance’s sister, said it was devastating to learn that Mr. Dykes may get a new trial. The notion that he was somehow a victim is “heart wrenching,” she said.

Allegations of religious and racial bias in Alameda County jury selection have surfaced before. In 2005, John R. Quatman, a former prosecutor in the district attorney’s office, gave a sworn declaration that “it was standard practice to exclude Jewish jurors in death cases.”

Mr. Quatman said at the time that a trial judge in a death penalty case had advised him to make sure that no Jewish jurors were selected.

“He said I could not have a Jew on the jury, and asked me if I was aware that when Adolf Eichmann was apprehended after World War II, there was a major controversy in Israel over whether he should be executed,” he said. Mr. Quatman added that the judge said, “no Jew would vote to send a defendant to the gas chamber.”

There is limited polling on Jewish views of the death penalty, but a 2014 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that among Jews support for capital punishment was notably lower than among white Protestants and white Catholics, while higher than among Hispanics and among Black Protestants.

Rabbi Jacqueline Mates-Muchin, the senior rabbi at Temple Sinai in Oakland, which is about to celebrate its 150th anniversary, said that learning of the alleged past pattern of bias among local prosecutors struck especially hard, given the rise of antisemitism today.

“It’s pretty awful,” she said. “The word disappointing isn’t enough.”

Alameda County, with a population of about 1.6 million, is home to about 50,000 Jews, according to a 2020 estimate by the American Jewish Population Project at Brandeis University .

Rabbi Mates-Muchin said the revelations are troubling on many fronts. “I feel horribly for the families of the victims. I also think that it isn’t fair to these defendants, who did not have a decent representation of the community that they’re from judging their case.”

Proving bias in selecting jurors, though, is notably difficult. Using what are known as peremptory challenges, lawyers can strike a certain number of prospective jurors without necessarily having to provide a reason. Even when a reason is required, lawyers can often draw on answers to jury questionnaires for indications of bias that can be used to justify excluding someone.

“For as long as there have been jury trials in death penalty cases, there has been racial discrimination and religious discrimination in the selection of juries,” said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, an independent research organization within the Philadelphia law firm Phillips Black. “And we see it most frequently in the context of prosecutors striking African-American jurors.”

Brian Pomerantz, a lawyer who specializes in appeals of capital cases and represents Mr. Dykes alongside another attorney, Ann-Kathryn Tria, said that exposing jury bias in death penalty prosecutions in Alameda has been “my life’s quest.”

“I’ve been chasing this for a decade,” said Mr. Pomerantz, who also represents two other death row inmates in Alameda cases whose trials he believes were tainted by the exclusion of Black and Jewish jurors.

California has the largest death row in the nation — there are currently 640 condemned inmates — but the state has not executed anyone since 2006. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, is opposed to capital punishment and has imposed a moratorium on executions. He has also shut down the death chamber at San Quentin prison and transferred death-row inmates to other prisons around the state.

It is not difficult to look in any corner of the country and find cases overturned because of jury bias, and prosecutors’ offices where striking jurors based on race or religion was common.

“Historically we’ve seen practices by prosecutors — and we know this to be true, because we’ve seen videotapes of their lectures to their colleagues,” said Robin M. Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “We’ve seen training manuals where it says, make sure to exclude everyone — women, Jews, people of color — anyone who is part of a group that they think could sympathize with someone who was on trial for his life.”

In Philadelphia, a training video that showed prosecutors how to exclude Black jurors was unearthed, leading to overturned convictions. In Mississippi, a Black man, Curtis Flowers , was tried six times in the same murder case, and ultimately the Supreme Court overturned his death sentence after ruling the prosecutors violated the Constitution in selecting the jury. More recently, a court in North Carolina held a hearing last month about allegations of racial bias in selecting a jury in the case of Hasson Bacote , a Black man sentenced to death in 2009.

Mr. Pomerantz said the emergence of such bias in Alameda County, in the heart of the liberal Bay Area, shows how ubiquitous the practice has been in the United States.

“You’re talking about where Berkeley is,” he said. “This isn’t Alabama. This isn’t Texas.”

Kirsten Noyes and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

Tim Arango is a correspondent covering national news. He is based in Los Angeles. More about Tim Arango

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PDF A Definitive Guide to The Memories We Lost and Anthology of Short
1. MEMORIES WE LOST By Lidudumalingani Mqombofhi About the Author The author Lidudumalingani was born in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa in a village called Zikhovane. Lidudumalingani is a writer, filmmaker and a photographer. He grew up herding cattle and moulding goats from clay and later grew fond of words and images.
Memories We Lost and Other Stories
Memories We Lost and Other Stories Essays with answers. The essays below are mostly in marking scheme format. With points that examiners check. It should be noted that in an exam situation, essays should be written in prose and not point form as in some of the examples below. In an exam, the "Introduction", "Body" and "Conclusion" titles should ...
Memories we Lost and Other Stories Study Guide Notes (15)
Memories We Lost and Other Stories - Essays and Answers; Each story, as can be seen above, is written by a different author, contains different themes, plots, settings, and language, and the styles used in story narration are also different. Dowload the Memories we Lost and Other Stories Guide on Easy Elimu Today!
Caine Prize 2016: "Memories We Lost"—The Text, Its Readers and the
AiW Guest Pede Hollist The biography at the end of "Memories We Lost" quotes South African writer, filmmaker, and photographer Lidudumalingani as saying, "I am fascinated by mental illnesses, having seen my own extended relatives deal with it." He also tell readers the story represents his efforts at "trying to …invent ways that could help…
Bookforum talks with Lidudumalingani Mqombothi
When Lidudumalingani Mqombothi (he coolly goes by his first name) sat down to write "Memories We Lost," the short story that won him the 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing, he'd finished film school having felt frustrated at the lack of creative freedom on which film schools tend to pride themselves.The story, which he previously sought to turn into a film, concerns two teenage sisters ...
MEMORIES WE LOST by Lidudumalingani Mqombofhi
Memories we lost is a biography. The life of a sister seen by a younger sister. The story is about mental illness and its effect. It is first described as this thing that takes the narrator's younger sister. Over time it robs the sister of the ability to speak and remember hence the title Memories we lost. The title is a reflection of loss and ...
Memories We Lost by Lidudumalingani
The writer is good at writing words. The writer also needs to think a little harder on what he's writing. If we were living in a society that made it clear that there is a happy, safe middle for people with mental illnesses that both include medical help and allow them to function, this story would have just been an interesting look at a way someone else somewhere else might react to a ...
Memories We Lost and Other Stories Guide
Memories We Lost and Other Stories Guide - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. A guide
'Memories We Lost' Wins 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing
South African Lidudumalingani has won the 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story ' Memories We Lost'. Lidudumalingani was presented with the £10,000 prize by chair of judges, Delia Jarret-Macauley, at a ceremony at the Bodleian Library in Oxford yesterday (4th July). 'Memories We Lost' tells the "emotionally charged ...
A Guide to Memories We Lost and other stories
Ksh64. This guide provides a detailed analysis of the anthology of Memories we lost and other stories compiled by Chris Wanjala.The analysis is aimed at preparing KCSE candidates for both the excerpt as well as the compulsory essay questions in the examination.Furthermore, the guide is written in a manner that both the candidates and teachers ...
Memories We Lost and Other Stories Summary Notes
Schools Net Kenya August 31, 2018. Memories We Lost and Other Stories is an anthology of short stories compiled by Chris Wanjala. It is an optional English Set Book in Kenya. The book features many literary works done by different Authors from different Countries across the World hence a wider setting. The most featured work is 'Memories We ...
Lidudumalingani Mqombothi
Lidudumalingani Mqombothi was born in the village of Zikhovane in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. He was the 2016 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing with his short story "Memories We Lost". [2] [3] [4] As part of winning the prize, he visited Georgetown University in Washington, DC, for a series of events, including seminars and ...
Memories we Lost Essays & Answers PDF
MEMORIES WE LOST KCSE ESSAY QUESTION "The President" Mariatu Kamara. Write a composition on the effects of war, using illustrations from 'The President' by Mariatu Kamara. War is a devastating experience. When a country experiences war, the effects are disastrous. In the absence of peace both adults and children suffer.
Memories We Lost. AND OTHER STORIES.
A beautiful collection of stories from different backgrounds,,with meaningful life lessons and awareness. The first story Memories we lost brings out schizophrenia awareness, How much land does a man need potrays that greed and gluttony for material possession is at the end not worthy.My father's head,Light, The umbrella man.The president by mariatu kamara emotionally takes us through the ...
MEMORIES WE LOST GUIDE PDF DOWNLOAD
KCSE SET BOOKS ESSAY QUESTIONS and ANSWERS. Enjoy free KCSE revision materials on imaginative compositions, essay questions and answers and comprehensive analysis (episodic approach) of the set books including Fathers of Nations by Paul B. Vitta, The Samaritan by John Lara, A Silent Song by Godwin Siundu, An Artist of the Floating World by ...
Summary Notes of Memories We Lost and Other Stories
Memories We Lost and Other Stories is an anthology of short stories compiled by Chris Wanjala. It is an optional English Set Book in Kenya. The book features many literary works done by different Authors from different Countries across the World hence a wider setting. The most featured work is 'Memories We Lost' by a South African Author ...
Memories we lost, and other stories : an anthology of short stories
Memories we lost, and other stories : an anthology of short stories / compiled by Chris Wanjala. Format Book Published Nairobi : Moran Publishers, 2016. Description 164 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm Other contributors Wanjala, Chris, compiler. Subject headings Short stories. ISBN
Essays on Set books The Pearl, A Doll's House, Memories we Lost
Lesson 8 in a one-term course of academic writing. The course aims at providing students with basic instruction in essay writing, with a special emphasis on literary critical essays. The students are guided through all the stages involved in the process of writing, ranging from choosing the topic to compiling a bibliography.
Memories we lost
memories we lost, kcse English revision, kcse past papers questions and answers, kcse revision questions and answers, revision kcse questions and answers, re...
Memories We Lost Guide [Kcse]
About this app. arrow_forward. memmories we lost guide is a guide for teachers and students with a language that is simple to understand and interpret, it explains the story and content in memories we lost in details so that the reader understands what the writer of the story meant in each story. bonus feature: after all the stories there are ...
Memories Essay: Most Exciting Examples and Topics Ideas
Memories of Happiness and Accomplishments in My Life. Essay grade: Poor. 3 pages / 1435 words. Throughout life, I have many memorable events. The unforgettable moments of my life vary from the worst moment of my life and some are the best because they become milestones to remember forever.
Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning
Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to ...
These Are the Stories We Tell Ourselves
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The One Thing Voters Remember About Trump
We asked voters for the one thing they remembered most about the Trump era. Few of them cited major events like the pandemic and Jan. 6.
Can Forgetting Help You Remember?
To attribute all that we are to memory bypasses what is forgotten but not lost. ♦ Published in the print edition of the May 20, 2024 , issue, with the headline "Forget It."
Read Only Memories: Neurodiver review: Existential ...
Lucas White. May 15, 2024 7:00 AM. 1. Read Only Memories: Neurodiver is a long-awaited sequel to 2015's 2064: Read Only Memories, announced all the way back in 2019. It's a visual novel with a ...
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After Debris Removal, Lahaina Fire Survivor Left With Blank Slate For
We still have a ways to go toward our goal of $75,000! ... "A lot of people talked about how bad they felt and they cried for all the life that was there that's been lost, all of the memories ...
Exclusion of Jewish Jurors Prompts Review of California Death Row Cases
Published May 13, 2024 Updated May 14, 2024, 10:23 a.m. ET. A jury was being chosen for a murder trial nearly three decades ago in California. The state was seeking a death sentence for Ernest ...

Caine Prize 2016: “Memories We Lost”—The Text, Its Readers and the World, a review by Pede Hollist

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