voicing fake punches of punctuation

As Soldier nears its close – which functions just as much as an open – Jordan articulates a distinction between making choices: “I wasn’t too happy about maybe having to choose / between having brains and being pretty. / I wasn’t too happy that maybe somebody else / had already made that choice for me” (260). I consider choice in the context of crafting creative nonfiction, Jordan’s choices in crafting Soldier. With voice on the mind as I began reading, I grew increasingly interested in the ways the narrator’s voice shifts between adult and “child”, the author’s punctuation (quotation marks, exclamation points) choices and how this functions to create voice. Equally striking are frame and what seems the most prominent sort of soldier – soldier of internalization.

But first this voice thing. At the title, A Poet’s Childhood, I wonder how Jordan might choose to tell childhood, from which perspective, but the wonder is no longer post-prologue: it seems the nature of the childhood will inform voice, the how, the perspective. A child forced to grow up, to become a soldier, – “anything like a regular childhood lay entirely behind me” – in a sense breeds an adult voice, reflected when looking back, when reflecting (19). And this informed, educated voice is immediate, from inside the womb an intense, throbbing tone is set: “A beastly heat set records while my mother labored more than twenty-five hours, alone, inside a shuttered hospital room”; “But she felt sundered by an agony that would subside only to return with a piercing intensity that lasted quite beyond her sensible endurance” (3). We can also trust the narrator early; this is pregnancy – there’s “sweat and bits of shit and blood,” her mother “drenched the sheets beneath her torment and she twisted and she toiled through arduous hours of her sacred tribulation…” (3). June is not just “born on the hottest day, in Harlem,” she is Born.

So from before birth we embark, mature-for-age voice established. Though framed by age: birth to age: twelve, thirteen maybe, we are pulled out of this frame by the voice of course established by word choice and an understanding of a bigger world outside of self (which I’ll explore soon). There remains a childhood voice, the attempts at communicating I question. While I do appreciate Jordan’s use of quotation marks to, it seems, draw our attention to words and ideas the narrator doesn’t quite grasp – “tomboy,” “planter’s wart,” “cauterize the area,” “acid” - it’s the seeming reliance on exclamation points to communicate childhood voice that causes me pause/a little annoyance/sometimes dismissal/always wondering about this choice.

Harsh, perhaps, and I trace my distaste (but no less appreciation) of overuse of punctuation like the exclamation point to its sometimes overuse in magical realism. But this is not knocking; rather, my attention to it comes from wonder, wonder if such punctuation hit anyone else as it did me? What other choices do we have in crafting childhood voice? I’ll contextualize, realizing that by placing some together in this way is a sort of (re)bombardment.

In part three (a lyric essay?) “Deep Sea Fishing and the Beach”: “My father had explained to me how early he’d have to wake me up: Two o’clock in the morning!” (82). “And I must not let [mother] forget to pack plenty of plums and grapes and peaches!” (86). “Fishing was nothing but a big dirty trick!” (89). “We were having a very good time!” (94). “If I had never thought much about fish before, I would never forget them after this!” (95).

Exclamation points at closer proximity in part ten: “Promises, Apple Trees, and Pretty Miss Kitty”: “I wondered what was it about a bicycle!...But a few days later an enormous box arrived. It was my brand-new bicycle!” (222). At camp: “Even when it rained, you could still do almost everything except play ball, which I was one thousand percent enthusiastic about: Any kind of ball!...I thought camp was the best! I could not stop laughing! I ran to every activity! I ran down the steep rocky dirt to the lake! I ran up the hill to the dining hall. I could not stop running!” (231).

My smart ass wants to say “enough already!!!” but a more serious me is invested in exploring this choice to rely on such punctuation, especially while keeping in mind that the character seems mostly a soldier of internalization, and this punctuation seems a departure from that soldier. The prologue sets us up for the internal: “I’d imagine…,” “I got it in my head…,” “In a slow moment I might notice…,” “I’d be worrying…,” “Whenever I let myself slide into any of his fabulous stories…,” “And I would conjure up…” And moments like this spot the text, as do tense switches, the latter of which I have more of a hypothesis for. Take the shift to present tense that begins part two, appears again in the middle of part and two, and then closes part two. The subject matter is trauma. The tense incites immediacy. The pace quickens with the slip into poetry to close part two. A way to write trauma, to deal with trauma emerges.

This trauma feels like real punches, the punctuation – fake ones…

michellelouisegeck