People yearn to see “some sense and pattern to their lives” and context as well as language creates the meanings and abstract symbols through which we understand our world.59
Creative imagery and metaphor can assist with the process of telling and listening, of sharing, describing, negotiating, adapting, and if needed, changing meanings. If used well, metaphors resonate with imagination and emotion, activating broader cultural codes, such as core iconography or particular narrative tropes. This is part of the back and forth process of sense and meaning making; the bringing of the personal into dialogue with the social and then back once more to the personal.
The telling and sharing of one’s story to another is a dialogue, even if done through the medium of memoir.60 However in order for the story to be properly understood – that is,
56 Clifford, ‘Diasporas’, 307.
57 Boym, ‘Off-Modern Homecoming in Art and Theory’, 164.
58 Thakkar, ‘Foreign Correspondence’, 207-208. Thakkar uses the term ‘affiliative relations’ borrowed from
Edward Said.
59 Phil Macnaghten, ‘Nature’, Theory, Culture, & Society 23 (2006): 348.
60 Whitlock, Soft Weapons. Writing is often done with an ‘imagined’ reader in mind, be it a family member,
editor, community, or simply just another interested human being out there somewhere. Memoirs can be seen as dialogic narrative transmitters in the sense that there is an articulator (the writer) and a receiver (the
112 to be truly ‘heard’ and received – it must be somewhat comprehensible to the audience. This can present a challenge when sharing accounts of unprecedented historical events and exceptional disasters such as mass displacement. Many people, for example, who themselves have never encountered similar circumstances may find it initially difficult to imagine or relate to such experiences.61 Given the unprecedented nature of the
displacement, however, this lack of a prior reference point is, however, also the same for many Mizrahim who were dispersed. In this way, the need to shape a comprehensible life story through writing can have the added effect of aiding the memoirist in their own process of sense and meaning making, therefore assisting the possible recovery of greater wellbeing.62 Joyce Zonana, for example, specifically reflects in her memoir that:
Language, I like to think, will make my past present, bringing continuity and coherence to a life marked by loss.63
Symbols provide a powerful way to communicate meaning and the natural world encompasses a rich source for finding shared reference points, potential shared understandings, and unifying patterns for coherence.64 Within writing, metaphors are one
way to activate core cultural symbols and narrative tropes. Throughout the memoirs under study, organic metaphors are drawn upon as a symbolic referential language that aids expression of personal experience. Read separately, and together, they reveal both personal and collective understandings of history, home, identity, and belonging, and the lived negotiation of these within the ongoing legacy of displacement. Emerging repeatedly within these texts, the metaphorical image of the ‘tree’ is especially strong in this process.65
Trees, as a sight common across most of the globe, provide an almost universal symbolic reference point that can be imagined or related to in some way.66 Consequently, they are a
possible source of cross-cultural commonality and provide opportunities for empathy even
reader). ‘Conversation’ can take place through reviews, critique, but also the discussion that is prompted within society if such a text resonates (or is promoted) strongly enough.
61 Barbara Backer Condon, ‘Imagination: The What-if in Thinking’, Nursing Science Quarterly 27 (2014): 204-210. 62 Kent D. Harber and James W. Pennebaker, ‘Overcoming Traumatic Memories’, in The Handbook of Emotion
and Memory: Research and Theory, ed. Sven-Ake Christianson (New York: Psychology Press, 1992), 359-387.
63 Zonana, Dream Homes, 26. 64 Macnaghten, ‘Nature’, 348.
65 Benjamin, Last Days in Babylon, xi; Jawary, Baghdad, I Remember, 192-194; Goldin, Wedding Song, 9; Fathi, Full
Circle, 31, 374; Haddad, Flight from Babylon, 108-109; Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound, 435; Schinasi-Silver, 42 Keys to the Second Exodus, 162; Shamash, Memories of Eden, 58, 225; André Aciman, False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (New York: Picador, 2000), 39, 86; Sabar, My Father’s Paradise, 219, 226, 284; Zonana, Dream Homes, 47, 61.
113 when communicating subjective experiences across different backgrounds and cultures.67
Due to their relative neutrality trees have the potential to form a unifying image. Yet through also being highly relatable, they can be especially potent symbols when imbued with additional meanings.68 Trees provide an easily identifiable parallel between a person
and the natural world – an opportunity for people to contemplate both nature and themselves. People ‘read into’ trees their place in time, the cycle of their own lives with the changing seasons, their relationship to place, as well as a sense of personal uniqueness.69
Whether drawn upon consciously or unconsciously, the presence throughout the memoirs of organic metaphorical symbols like trees is far from benign in effect. Within these narratives, the imagery of trees is used in a very personal way. But the imagery is also culturally loaded, steeped in religious or political rhetoric, imbued with personal nostalgia or melancholy in the articulation of identities. In what follows, I explore how memoirists’ metaphorical reference to trees can aid in explaining the personal importance of origins, the effects of displacement, and understandings of subsequent post-displacement life.