East Lansing

While I envisioned this as a project that would speak things I had not completely spoken, and one that would describe how I got the language to speak these things, the theme of expressing something that was unspeakable became so prominent, so overwhelming that I felt I had to address it here.

Throughout this memoir, I have included collages that I created as another way of speaking my histories. While most of the memoir is alphabetic text, I also have other ways of knowing that, at times, seem more powerful and resonant to me than words. Speaking is about finding a voice, and voices can be found in so many places. So many scholars in rhetoric—Malea Powell, Qwo-Li Driskill, Jackie Rhodes, Jonathan Alexander, Jody Shipka, Alexandra Hidalgo, and many inspiring others—draw on rhetorics outside of words to express themselves and their cultural histories, relationships, and memories.

The second thing I would like to emphasize here is that we can speak from trauma and make it meaningful. The number of people I see who dismiss trauma and survivors' ability to speak is disturbing. So many believe in trauma as destruction, as brokenness. Therefore, people either "fix" themselves (get over it) or they stay destroyed. The fixed people assimilate into society once more. The destroyed people are overlooked, because they are destroyed and have nothing to contribute.

Survivors are neither fixed nor destroyed. We can still contribute, we can still produce, we can speak in languages that no one else can understand. But we are always survivors, not "fixed" even if we are healing, even if we have good days. More importantly, we are not broken.