On Texture

I’m reading two memoirs—one about the daughter of a Mexican immigrant to the US, the other about the daughter of a Korean immigrant—and both deal with the pain and frustration of being outsiders, outcasts in a culture that doesn’t “see” them, a society which doesn’t allow them full access to its riches or its opportunities. 

In a way they’re the same story of the immigrant experience. But since two different people from two very different cultures and backgrounds are telling these stories, there are some subtle (and not so subtle) differences.

Listen to Cathy Park Hong in Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning describe her father:

On paper, my father is the so-called model immigrant. Upon meeting him, strangers have called my father a gentleman for his quiet charisma and kindness, a personality he cultivated from years of selling life insurance and dry-cleaning supplies to Americans of all manner of race and class. But like many model immigrants, he can be angry.

Hong describes her father as “highly sensitive about his own racial identity to the point where everything came down to race.”

Here, listen again to Hong:

If we were waiting for a table, and someone was seated before us, he pointed out that it was because we were Asian. If he was seated way in the back of the plane, he said it was because he was Asian. When my parents moved me into my dorm room during the first week at Oberlin in Ohio, my father shook my roommate’s father’s hand, who then asked him where he was from. When my father said South Korea, my roommate’s father eagerly replied that he fought in the Korean War.

 

My father smiled tightly and said nothing.

Now listen to Maria Hinojosa writing in her memoir, Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America, about her father:

Once Raúl got to the Brownsville bus stop he immediately boarded and off they went on the flat, brown roads of southern Texas. Dad had never traveled this way in the US and had never traveled through Texas by land, so he was at first excited to see the landscape, but then bored by the sameness of the view outside his window. Hours later the bus made its first stop on the US side of the border, still in Texas. When Raúl got off and made his way to the bathroom off to the side of the gray gas pumps, he was suddenly confronted with the original sin of this country.

In the back of the small station there were two bathroom doors, but it wasn’t one for men and one for women. Here, above each rickety door, was a sign painted on a wooden panel hanging by a rusty nail. One sign said WHITE. The other said COLORED.

Raúl sighed. Was he white or colored? And if he wasn’t one or the other did he even exist in this country?

The question humiliated and disgusted him.

In both examples you can “hear” and “feel” the texture of the language. Some might call it the voice of each writer, how each writer, just as each person, sounds different and speaks with a different voice unique to that person. And it is voice. But it’s the texture of their voices, the way it feels to read the words each writer puts on the page, that strikes me as so different—not because the authors have had different experiences or view those experiences through different lenses (Mexican, Korean), but because the words they choose, the way each writer arranges the words on the page (with Spanish scatted throughout or a Korean word appearing on the page) gives each story a different feel.

It’s like touching different fabric. Silk feels different from wool, and both feel different from cotton or nylon. Some fabric feels smooth, other fabric rough. It’s the same with language, as if the writer is knitting a story, and the fabric of the story is what the reader can feel, can touch—though we don’t really touch it, we “hear” the texture—if you can think of it this way—in our inner ear, the space where our senses absorb words, where language has the power to spark and touch us, where we “feel” the emotional impact of the words a writer chooses to put on the page the same way a weaver or knitter chooses which pattern to use.

Texture conveys the heart of the writer. It lets you feel the words flowing from the writer’s heart to yours. It lets you wrap yourself in words the way you might wrap yourself in a blanket to feel its warmth, to hold someone else in your arms, to lose yourself inside another person’s way of being in the world.

I’m not sure texture is something you think about as you write any more than you can think about voice. It’s part of you, like a fingerprint, and it identifies you as you each time you set words on paper, each time you choose a word and place that word in a sentence... the way only you can place it.

If you’re interested in reading more about Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, visit: 

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/605371/minor-feelings-by-cathy-park-hong/

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/minor-feelings-and-the-possibilities-of-asian-american-identity

https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-are-you-pissed-on-cathy-park-hongs-minor-feelings-an-asian-american-reckoning/

And if you’d like to read more about Maria Hinojosa’s Once I Was You, visit: 

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Once-I-Was-You/Maria-Hinojosa/9781982128654

https://www.shondaland.com/inspire/books/a34305279/maria-hinojosa-once-i-was-you/

https://bookpage.com/reviews/25444-maria-hinojosa-once-i-was-you-nonfiction#.YN8jPC1h2CQ

The Feel of Water

When you dive into a pool or rush into the sea, do you notice the feel of the water against your skin?

Is it hot or cold, muddy or clear, salty or fresh?

Is it slick (with oil, sadly) or still pure, slimy or silty?

And when you begin reading a story, are you aware of the feel–the texture– of the story?

What do I mean by texture?

It’s like the physical sensation that you’d get from rubbing your hand over a woven blanket. You’d be able to feel the difference between a blanket made of wool or cotton, one coarser than the other, with yarn thicker than thread.

The same would be true of a rug, one made from synthetic fibers, for instance, and one made from natural fibers, a braided rug or a woven rug or a rug created with needle and thread finely sewn rather than casually woven.

The way an author lays words on a page creates the texture that a reader feels when reading that page.

Texture is a combination of the author’s voice, the narrator's point-of-view, the setting (both in time and place), the inner spirit driving the narrative voice, and the authority of that voice to tell the story.

Texture is what creates trust (or distrust) between the narrator and the reader. It’s what allows a reader to settle comfortably (and irresistibly) into a story or sit on edge, unsure if the narrator is reliable.

I raise the question of texture because after weeks of immersing myself in westerns (Louis L’Amour) and detective mysteries (Robert B. Parker), I began reading Karen Cushman’s new book, Alchemy and Meggy Swan, last night, and I could feel a texture in her story that felt different than the textures that I had come to expect to feel in westerns and detective mysteries.

Here’s an example of the texture that Cushman creates in the opening pages of Alchemy and Meggy Swan:

“Ye toads and vipers,” the girl said, as her granny often had, “ye toads and vipers,” and she snuffled a great snuffle that echoed in the empty room. She was alone in the strange, dark, cold, skinny house. The carter who had trundled her to London between baskets of cabbages and sacks of flour had gone home to his porridge and his beer.

And here’s another example, a few pages later:

Meggy and the carter had arrived in London earlier that day while the summer evening was yet light. Even so, the streets were gloomy, with tall houses looming on either side, rank with the smell of fish and the sewage in the gutter, slippery with horse droppings, clamorous with church bells and the clatter of cart wheels rumbling on cobbles. London was a gallimaufry of people and carts, horses and coaches, dogs and pigs, and such noise that made Meggy’s head, accustomed to the gentle stillness of a country village, ache.

What texture!

How does Cushman create such a rich texture–a tapestry of textures–on the page?

Look at the word selection in the first paragraph: toads and vipers, snuffled, strange, dark, cold, skinny, trundled, London, cabbages, porridge and beer.

And, again, look at the words Cushman has used in the second paragraph: gloomy, looming, rank, smell of fish, sewage, gutter, slippery, horse droppings, clamorous, church bells, clatter, cart wheels, rumbling, cobbles, London, gallimaufry (!)... and on and on.

These paragraphs show texture at its finest, and it’s the reason why a reader trusts Cushman and her narrator implicitly. She has done her research. She knows the world of which she writes. And this knowledge is transmitted to the reader in such a way as to establish the trust that lets a reader simply give himself up to the storyteller.

Texture is what lets a storyteller capture a reader’s heart and mind. You can feel the texture of any story the moment you open a book and begin to read. Try it the next time you begin reading.

Or take a book off your shelf right now and open it and see if you can feel the texture... and try to describe it to yourself. Then open another book by another author and see if you can compare the textures.

How does texture differ from story to story? From storyteller to storyteller?

What’s the texture that you’re trying to create in your own story? How would you describe it? Can you feel it? And have you conveyed that feeling effectively to your reader? Or do you need to keep weaving, stitching together words to create your own tapestry of a story?