The tandem release of Faith Adiele’s two new books, Voice/Over and Her Voice, create a hand-in-hand hybrid memoir in two different forms. Her Voice is a slippery swim of prose in search of a lost voice; Voice/Over is a screenplay that spans decades over the course of one election night in 1972.
The silent character who is given a voice in both works is Adiele’s beloved late grandmother, Mummi. Adiele outlines her with profound affection and longing, even as she tries to grasp at the memory of Mummi’s spoken voice. Anyone who has lost someone knows that remembering a voice is an alchemic undertaking. It can be like trying to grasp sand as it runs through your fingers, so close and never quite staying put.
In my Zoom interview with Adiele, a silent character appears onscreen at the beginning of our talk, behind the author’s right ear: a large doe, peering in over her shoulder through the window with focused curiosity. A moment later, and the doe slips away as if she’d never been there. This ungulate marginalia to my talk sketches a visual reminder of what Adiele says of her own people in Voice/Over, who “speak from the margins” instead of from the centre of the page. Adiele uses photos, dialogue, movie references, and hybrid prose to resurrect Mummi for herself and for us, until Mummi has a more fixed tangibility than the elusive doe.
Finding these books of re-creation had the happy serendipity of having a tune in my head, and turning on the radio to hear it playing as if I had sent in a request over the airwaves. I hadn’t even known I was humming a melody of lost grandmothers and eastern Washington until Adiele’s books played them. Adiele asks:
What is the correct ambient noise to call childhood out of its tunnel of white? I am a hoarder of family artefacts, of what is lost in the act of im/migration and re/making. I have always relied on my senses to lead the way. The taste of words in my mouth, the way they accumulate on the page, building portals to the past. The lost emotions preserved in old bottles, just waiting for me to uncork and inhale. The ghostly indentations and traces of warmth left behind in used clothes.
But how do you go about recapturing the sound of a voice that no longer exists?
Adiele has her methods, as one might expect in a scrapbook of memory, poetical formatting, video stills, musings and random inserts including long strings of fishy ellipses formed of an obscure font. She goes about assembling her own séance of sound, from water hitting the hot coals of a sauna to Finnish audio clips.
Unless you were among those few whose family had audio recordings of loved ones back in the day, those of us who lost someone before the age of constant recording know how fleeting their departure is, quick as a deer stepping out of frame. What really pulls Adiele forward is reading her grandmother’s diaries and discovering the woman as an adult.
We live in a tsunami age of shorts and memes and four-second sound bites that hook us and train us to think in tatters. But Her Voice is the stuff of real memory and longing, told in the kind of scraps and tatters that will be familiar to anyone missing a long-gone family member. It’s a flotsam of memories that float back up or need to be conjured with scents and sounds, or talismans.
It’s like trying to hold on to water. Even when you’re swimming in it, it’s impossible—even though it’s heavy enough to make you work to get through it. The water becomes heavier, yet still elusive, once it is revealed that these memories, this collage of life so lovingly created, is actually the collage of a child discovering that her Most Important Person is dying—and of the adult writer realising that she was the last to know.
Even with countless recordings at our disposal, memory finds a way to thwart us. I ask Adiele what she thinks of her project in an age of endless media at everyone’s fingertips. She responds that the retrieval methods may be different, but the challenges remain.
“You won’t be like an archaeologist putting these shards together and trying to come up with a story. I think you’ll be carving away from the noise to try to find out: What is the story? And I wonder if something gets lost in that process of having this entire Alexandrian library of data. And kind of going, ‘I can’t even tell what’s important anymore.’”
Adiele succeeds, profoundly, in helping us hear Mummi’s voice speak through her granddaughter, echoing through the family lines and telegraphing Mummi’s commitment to life and love, into the here and now. She does this by evoking specifics in place, in life, in memory, in silent family films, in photographs rearranged to continually take new form.
“When you’re doing memoir or family history, something is always standing in for something else, too. A photograph is a representation of something. What are the various things? I can assemble. To try to really resurrect her.
“I say I’m trying to remember her voice, but really, for my grandmother to come back and love me, to bring her back to life… It’s a haunting, right? It’s a language. Which is so hard to deliver.”
I mentioned the melody of grandmothers and eastern Washington. That’s because my own family settled there in the 1870s. I’m a settler descendant and spent my summers about an hour from Yakima Valley, where Adiele’s books are set. Our grandmothers were born within a couple of years of one another, and the mention of all the Yakima fruit preserves and Washington apples, the small-town life, the 1970s summers, took me right back. But wait. In my summers out there, I remember it being one white enclave after another, surrounded by Native American reservations that settler offspring like me and my family managed not to see, as if by unspoken agreement. Unlike Seattle and the coastal areas, eastern Washington is a historically conservative area.
So I asked Adiele the question anyone like me who spent time in that place, in that era, might ask: Was it hard being a rare person of colour in conservative white communities, in an otherwise all-white family?
“You know, our family and people always say, like, oh, must have been so hard for you to grow up Black there. And it’s like, well, you know, my family was already weird. It was harder to be Democrat. It was harder to be anti-war. It was hard to be atheist. All of that was harder. Being Black was just one of many things.”
Adiele provides a multitude of of lists, including various approaches to filmmaking, recipes, memory snippets, all of which frame and fill in her exploration of what went on with her grandmother during the period which culminated in Mummi’s early demise; a discursive exploration of ideas and events connected by the sinews of nostalgia, but also, with the muscle memory of family habit and training.
“I remember Mom talking about what a philosopher (Mummi) was and how she always studied human behaviour. That’s what she talked about. You could think it was gossip. It was an inquiry into human behaviour and so when she talked with people around her it was trying to figure out what was the right thing, what was going to happen next, why are people behaving the way they behave.
“My grandfather just referred to it as ‘woman talk,’ but they would sit around the kitchen table and try to figure these things out and then my mom would bring in the political stuff too. So they were in fact doing all of the things that I’m interested in, which is using personal narrative to reveal larger political and social things. It’s not gossip. It’s a discourse on human behaviour and morality.”
Voice/Over is a different set of fragments, told in screenplay form over the course of one election night in 1972. Narrated by Adiele’s character at different times in her life, it frames her family’s wholehearted commitment to civil rights, justice, and the voting process in the American system. Coming from a background of Finnish immigrant heritage, the family was on the left end of American politics from the moment of their arrival.
Adiele’s love of and education in cinema is evident not only in her choice of screenplay format, but in the films she chooses to signify her family’s sauntering forth to vote: The Magnificent Seven in all its self-sacrificing, glory-for-the-greater-good vibe of protecting the helpless that has often gone missing today. In this case, their action is carried forward by voting.
Voice/Over carries within it the collage elements of Her Voice, with historical photos – family photos – iterated in collage form throughout to different effect. The timeline jumps around, from that Election Night when Adiele is a girl, to a college-age Adiele whose dialogue informs the reader that she speaks in a voice that is “quiet but refusing to stage whisper” while being informed in film class that the overtly racist 1915 film Birth of a Nation is a Cinematic Masterpiece, and how “cinema shapes reality”. The aphorism is then used to good effect as Adiele, in turn, shapes the cinema of Akira Kurosawa, John Sturges, and Antoine Fuqua to her retrospective reality in all the iterations of The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven.
There’s a throughline of political engagement and discourse that runs from the early 20th-century history of Finnish immigrants to the 1970s family kitchen table, to Election Night, to college-aged Faith in the 1980s, through to today’s Faith, using all these elements to create a new script. In the middle of it all, are the ballot-slinging heroes of Adiele’s family characters, swagging across the parking lot in Yakima Valley, Washington, “obsessed with championing the underdog.” And yet, through all that, Adiele’s character of Grown-Up Faith explains that she found it hard to champion herself as one of the only mixed-race kids in a white, politically right-leaning region of Washington.
Without spending too much time on it, Adiele reflects her cinephile background with reflections on James Bond movies, yellowface, Yul Brenner’s chameleon-like ethnic metamorphosis, and Grace Jones as a captivating artist. It’s a deft filmic montage of left-wing politics, middle-American oppression of the most recent immigrants, and the tiny family routines that make up memory. The Election Night voting, and getting to the polls on time, is the motor that keeps it ticking over. Will they make it to the polls on time?
I asked Adiele why she chose Election Night 1972 in Voice/Over. It turns out, this particular election night is excerpted from a multi-generational, multi-genre master narrative, a single cup drawn from a vast well. Her Voice is also excerpted from the same master narrative. They were the excerpts that Adiele and her editor liked when they were placed side-by-side. Like parallel streams, they overlap and diverge in format and in subject. I asked whether she had a preferred order of reading for the two works.
She has a surprising amount to say on that topic. Like many questions that seem small, my query is about something that turns out to be much larger.
“That’s funny. ‘Cause it’s been such a process and now that (the books) are out, people have asked me what order to read them in and I’m completely gobsmacked and flabbergasted. That actually came up with my first memoir, Meeting Faith, that has the journal entries in the margins. People also say, like, ‘How am I supposed to read it? Do I read the memoir in the middle first and then go to the margins or do I read across?’
“And one of the first things people want to tell me when they meet me is how they read it, which is kind of cool. This kind of non-traditional or hybrid or experiential or innovative structures, however you want to talk about it—for me it’s a political decision, and I say: hybrid structures for hybrid lives. I can’t go within the smooth single linear narrative that is part of the settlement of the American West and all the fantasies of Manifest Destiny. I have to do something that explores the margins and also challenges our ideas of time and storytelling.”
Somewhere in this section, our online connectivity issues on the Zoom call become insurmountable between the San Francisco Bay Area and where I am in France. I have to leave the call, log out, log back in, and rejoin the call. Upon returning, I find that Adiele has continued, a little baffled at my lack of response, but gamely going on just in case I’m being an extremely patient listener behind my frozen image.
“I kind of feel these things out and then it’s like the text is, you know… shows me what it wants to do and then eventually I acquire language for what I’m doing and why I’m doing it that way. It asks a lot of the reader, and it gives them a lot of agency once they do decide. You can hold two things at the same time… I’m like, no, we’re not hierarchising the two narratives. They do different things. I would take that same approach here, though this was a different development.”
As it turns out later, the automatic call transcription has kept unilaterally recording even while I was absent. Echoing what Adiele deals with in her books, I could pick up the words later, if not the nuance and delivery.
“And so our idea is that Her Voice has got the more traditional memoir shape to it. It begins in the present looking back and bringing the family to life, resurrecting them, bringing the voice to life. Voice/Over takes one particular day and time and just drills down and looks at a granular detail at the family on that one day, everything progressing.”
That explains Election Night. But what about choosing Hollywood’s The Magnificent Seven? Or the Japanese Western Seven Samurai? How did Adiele end up using that particular shelf of films about a gang of outsiders who team together to protect helpless villagers from outlaws? When reading Voice/Over, it seems like an inevitable choice. But Adiele came to it like a true cinephile.
“(My family) were moral people who did things and interrupted when bad things were happening and corrected things and supported women’s rights and supported queer rights. How to describe the swagger and the seriousness with which we (approached) election night… I was thinking, what are the possible things? And I thought, oh, it’s kind of like a Western.
“(My) grandmother liked the Finnish stoic sort of thing where you would suffer for the right cause. You would do the moral thing even though people around you didn’t understand the idea of the Pyrrhic victory in Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven. So, it just kind of hit all the marks. It’s something they would have watched.”
This perspective on the films also helps explain Adiele’s choice of using a screenplay format for Voice/Over. “When I write I’m very inspired by film in general. Sometimes I think about other books, but very often I think about film, particularly when I’m trying to come up with structure.”
Voice/Over does, indeed, have a cinematic narrative. It collapses and expands time, blasting back and forth in Adiele’s life and in her family’s history, circling back to its snapshot in time, that Election Night and the beacon of citizenship and civic responsibility: Voting.
These two books, brief as they are, speak volumes. They dovetail and fit, diverge and converge. There’s swagger and there’s seriousness. Read them in any order, and let the conjuring begin.
