Burying Mumoir

A compost-illogical enquiry into the symbiotic relationship between soil, words and resting (rough draft)

In Autumn 2022 I buried 110,000 words on my allottment.

Or perhaps planted.

Germinating otherwise.

Word-rich/storied-soil.

Phases of composting a Memoir.

Phase 1: Inciting incident.

In March 2021 my Mum passed away within three and a half weeks of being diagnosed with cancer. Those three and a half weeks were a beautiful gift. A chance to love and care for her at home and say, ‘thank you, see you later Mum’. In the last ten days of her life, Mum surrendered to our care-giving and to her Guru. We gave her the best possible ‘becoming of earth’¹ for her to pass into the ancestral realms, and meet the friends who’d been visiting her in the big room a couple of weeks before.

We never die alone.

The night before her death owls hooted all night.²

You record moments, little details, make notes in those last three and a half weeks. On tiny index cards and reporters notebooks and onto my phone and voice notes. You remember how much you’ll forget if you don’t. How you barely remember the moments from five years before, of your Dad’s last days, because you didn’t make notes.

I wasn’t a note-maker back then in the same way as now. I didn’t understand the need to remember the tiniest of tender moments. This time I made notes. Always writing writing writing. Moving pen across paper = keeping in-sane.

Phase 2. Make your griefing sing.

In an altered state of smadness³ you write two essays about your Mum.

Essay 1: Lost Birds

Essay 2: The Prediction

You somehow get them shortlisted in national and international competitions. The only competitions you’ve ever entered.

Based on these little successes and in the smadness of fresh-raked you grief decide you want to write a whole memoir about your mother and (tumultuous-never-boring) relationship with her. You submit a Developing Your Creative Practice application on a whim. You forget about it. You get it. Fuck.

Phase 3. Writing and transcribing.

You transcribe hours of those voice note recordings into A Document. This part takes two weeks.

You type up words from hundreds of those little index cards and a handful of reporters notebooks in to A Document. I don’t remember how long this takes.

You write and write and write. Memories and moments. Into grief. Into smadness and missingness. She doesn’t come and visit me. Not the way Dad did after he’d gone. You’re absolutely fucking lost in all these words. Missing in all these words. Missing Mum in all these words missing myself.

Lost.

You get a wise-woman to help you pull lost threads together. To connect the dis. To dig deeper and harder. To flip truths. To rehistorise. To suture partitions. To get more lost.

By Autumn 2021 you have 110,000 words in A Document.

Phase 4. Turn this into ‘A Something’.

What do you do when a rough draft refuses shaping? Editing? Like, it’s an entity that refuses departure. Wants to haunt.

‘No. No. No. Not changing. Not leaving. Staying like me.’

You write three chapters-sort-of. And a book proposal-sort-of.

You get a memoir mentor. They tell you to write a linear memoir and drop the poetry.

Except our lives aren’t linear. Poetry was prayed into my DNA from when I was half-me-waiting patiently inside my Grandmother.

My paternal grandfather prayed for all Kular generations and all living creatures ahead of him.

You do memoir courses like you’re supposed to. They tell you how to write a memoir. You don’t quite get them. The technique is confusing. The structure.

You’re told:

‘you’re writing is too beautiful’, ‘trying to be too clever’, ‘you write like Rainer Winn’, ‘all this needs re-writing’, ‘don’t re-write it’, ‘why are YOU writing about your mother as a first book, no-one wants to read about women like her’.

You’re told by people who’ve clearly not read your work:

‘this is fiction, not memoir’, ‘you’ll never get published’, ‘we can definitely get this published’, ‘buy my book on memoir writing and follow the formula’.

You do the work of writing. And you’re so fucking lost in 110,000 words that refuse shape. Why don’t they behave? Most of it’s crap⁴.

Your development year ends. You wonder what has developed other than utter confusion about memoir writing and publishing.

Phase 4: Inciting incident 2.

End of July 2022. You bang your head so hard on the ground in Yorkshire Sculpture Park your nose breaks blood on earth. Brain shakes stunned to elsewhere. For months and months:

you cannot read you cannot write you cannot drive you cannot bear noise you cannot string together sentences coherent you’re happily muddled forget stuff your head spinssssss

This happens one week before the 75th anniversary of the Partition of India. The same week your publisher decides to launch your poetry debut, about being a grandchild of The Partition and the healing power of nature and creativity on transgenerational trauma. This book is still mid-air.

You try to go back to edit those three chapters.

To edit those 110,000 words.

There’s a book to write.

That refuses writing.

Memoir becomes Mumoir.

This is righting.

Phase 5: Trust your instinct

You wake up one morning Autumn 2022. Print those 110,000 words. Print photos of Mum and me.

Back of a rickshaw, Amritsar 2014.

Few weeks before Mum files, us at home, 2022.

And Young Arundhati Roy smoking. I’m not sure why I need her there too.

You scrawl a thick white blessing over brown paper.

Perhaps it’s a farewell spell.

Add a feather.

Element of air.

You wrap us all up together in the spell-paper.

You’re done.

Walk us up to the allottment with a spade.

No thinking. Body being-doing.

Buriel site: Allottment 28a.

Weather: drizzle that settles in bones

Dig a hole.

Dig a (w)hole for Mumoir.

Rest you/us in there.

I think I’m going mad.

It feels like the sanest thing to do.

Burying words.

I feel like I’m burying my mother.

worded organisms & spells / rest within dirt / with worms / infused by goldfinch / wetness of fox / through soil / moon / storm

we morph

we mulch into ELSE

I trust the soil / I trust the ELSE / weaving a web of dark TRUST / soil & you & we / become we/become earth.

***

1. Inspired by ‘Becoming Earth”, Tiokasin Ghosthorse. He describes death as ‘becoming earth’. I love this definition.

2. Owls hooting before someone dies. In some cultures it is believed that owls hoot when someone is near death/dying. In my cultural heritage, it is said that dogs gather to howl when someone is dying.

3. smadness ~ sadness & madness smushed together.

4. Crap is also manure is also rich fertiliser.