Tag: Memoir

Tracy Anne Ong: Tethered

Grace is a multifaceted word, but even when I contemplate its various meanings, this book still embodies all of its definitions.

The parcel containing Tethered arrived many months ago as I was on my way out to the airport, and I gladly welcomed an additional book in my carry-on luggage.

Dear Mira,

I hope this book transports you to where you need to be.

Tracy

An apt dedication for a book-butterfly. I turned to the sky and the clouds framed by the plane window, and smiled at the perceptive mind behind the message. A page turn revealed a Rabindranath Tagore quote about a violin string that could only be free to sing once bound to the violin. Even the epigraph felt personal, and I paused to ponder its deeper meaning.

Soon enough, the plane landed in the capital. The urban bustle was not conducive to the stillness and attention that this book required, seeing that the initial passages already felt like the beginnings of an intimate conversation with a friend. Thus, it was tucked away and saved for the reading environment it deserved.

Months passed, dozens of other books were read. But just as I was starting to see the light at the end of a mentally and physically exhausting three-week tunnel when a loved one fell ill, this book seemed to beckon. And sure enough, it transported me to a place where I needed to be — a place of faith and gratitude, and I cannot think of a better place to be. What a gift, this book.

Tethered is grace exemplified, the same way Tracy is grace personified. I’ve only exchanged a few messages with her through Blithe Books, but even electronic messages cannot dilute the light in her soul that shines through her words. Imagine an entire book of it!

This is described as an account of a remarkable journey of recovery from a brainstem stroke that attacked all bodily functions and left only the mind to operate; but more than that, it is a beautiful note of gratitude for life, and a celebration of the mind and the spirit. The author’s optimism is apparent, but as one reads on, one realizes that it is not optimism but faith. 

For the believer, faith is the thing that both tethers and liberates. Only when the strings are bound to a violin can they be free, for the first time, to sing.

Tamim Ansary: West of Kabul, East of New York

I finished reading this book the day an article from the New York Times came into my inbox: “Afghanistan Has Become the World’s Largest Humanitarian Crisis.”

A passage from page 59 immediately came to mind: “We just shared the towering profundity of our loss, tasting that resignation to fate that came to us from our Afghan soil, for even as children, we knew that loss would deepen us. That’s what it means to be an Afghan.”

Published after 9/11 when it was Osama bin Laden and the Taliban that put Afghanistan on the map of the majority of Western consciousness, and during a time when the world was angry and calling for the bombing of Afghanistan as retribution, Ansary felt an urgency to let the world know that the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. 

“It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators… Some say, Why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, They’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering… There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets.”

“We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already.”

Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did that.”

And yet, this memoir gave room to a heart-warming aspect of Ansary’s writing. From his childhood in Kabul and Lashkargah to adulthood in the United States, there was still space for life, love, friendship, and even for travel.

Unfortunately, 20 years after this book’s publication, the dam is breaking in Afghanistan once more.

“History is like a river, except people can only live in lakes, so they dam the current and build villages by still waters — but the dam always breaks.”