As part of my research for a family memoir, I found myself in Colombia a couple of years ago interviewing relatives about my great-grandfather’s life. The memoir was inspired by a manuscript he left behind, in which he narrates a series of amazing episodes from his life in early to mid 20th century Colombia. While my great-grandfather left a lot of material for me to work with, there remained some significant gaps, since the manuscript tends to focus on his most exciting and outlandish memories. It does make for great reading, yet one is left wondering about some of the most important aspects of his life, which to him seem to have been so obvious as to not require putting down on paper. In particular, I needed my relatives to give me more details about his wife, my great-grandmother, whom it is clear from the writing that he adored, and yet about whom he gives few specifics, except for the constant mention of her “ensnaring eyes.” While the manuscript left me with a very strong sense of who he was, the woman who was his lifelong love remained a mystery to me. I felt that if I was going to proceed with the memoir, this was a gap I needed to fill.
My great-grandparents, Rafael Eduardo García Luque and María Luisa García Martínez.
Digging through closets and the minds of my relatives yielded an abundance of old photographs, stories, and even more writings from my great-grandfather. Through them, I started forming a mental picture of my great-grandmother, but what I really wanted was to get a sense of who she was in her own words. Yet as I kept looking, not a single letter she had penned turned up. This might not have surprised me in another context, but the Garcías are nothing short of addicted to family memorabilia. Surely she had written something that someone had lovingly kept?
Determined to find what I needed, I scheduled a meeting with about fifteen relatives who had known her. I was asking my great aunt for details of her parents’ engagement, when at last, finding herself at a loss, she unveiled the mystery for me.
“It’s a pity,” she said, “after Papá died, she took all the letters they had ever written to each other and burned them.”
She did what? I barely avoided responding to my elderly aunt with an expletive. This was the treasure trove I was looking for! How, how could she have just burned it?
For a long time, I struggled to understand her decision. It seemed pointless and wasteful to me. Why destroy the record of a life and a love story that her descendants would probably have cherished for generations? What good had it been to put her thoughts and feelings down on paper only to turn them into ash? Her marriage to my great-grandfather could have lived on indefinitely through those letters—how could she let those memories just disappear?
My frustration over her actions lasted until a couple of weeks ago, when for some reason I found myself thinking again about what she had done. It suddenly occurred to me that the burning of her letters was the exact contradiction of the modern obsession with posting one’s life on social media. Rather than taking some mundane event or offhand thought—let alone an awkward selfie—and making it public, she had taken what I can only imagine was a deep and significant part of her life and declared it private for all time.
I thought then of the way many of us can behave these days when going on vacation. We’re lying under a palm tree on some glorious beach, away from it all, a glimmering ocean before us—except we can’t see it because we’re too busy posting pictures of it on Instagram. And it doesn’t happen only during vacations. How many of us have not found ourselves at some point of the day considering something we might do or say from the point of view of its Facebook potential? Are we actually living, or has our life become so much research for potential posts?
Self-consciousness is one of the great gifts of being human, but it doesn’t come without its costs. Social media poses the danger of making us our own paparazzi, thus turning any moment which otherwise we might have simply lived—lived authentically—into an occasion for “crafting our brand.” A wealth of research has established that when extrinsic rewards are introduced into an activity, intrinsic motivations die off. When we live to post, we can begin losing our ability to enjoy our actions for their own sake—even our basic pleasures. A great meal seems less delicious when our friends fail to admire the picture of it we shared. Our actions suddenly lose their meaning without the “likes” to vindicate their existence.
I think that long before the existence of the Internet, my great-grandmother knew this. I think that in burning her letters, she was protecting her marriage. I think she was declaring—not to the world, but to herself—that what she had lived with her husband was good in itself, that its worth did not depend on anyone else’s approval or remembrance.
A book is not the same thing as a Facebook update, but to the aspiring memorist, hers is not a comfortable lesson to hear.
Juanita Baranowski says
So, is it implied in what you say that my Grandfather was unlike my Grandmother thinking that his life events were of more significance if he were to share them and leave the memoir for us to read?
I think not, mostly because I believe he left us the memoirs so we could know how people lived in those days. During his lifetime Colombia and Colombians lifestyle changed drastically with the introduction of new technology and ways of transpiration. I think he wanted us to know the beauty of the days gone by, of the simple life before cars and roads could be driven to where he lived, when people sent messages with doves not with a telephone call or even a telegram.
Her letters on the other hand probably had some very personal sentiments written in them which can lose their meaning if shared in public.
Most of the things people share FB are not personal sentiments sent to a loved one that when initially written were meant only for that person to read.
What people share mostly are “happenings” that we find amusing or interesting, pictures of beautiful places that we want others to be able to enjoy too.
When, for example I see a video or a picture of something new or cute my grandniece or grandnephew did or said, it makes me inmansely happy because I am not with them as often as I would like. Let’s me be a part of their life, or feel in touch somehow.
When a sister or a brother post pictures of the beauty of the places to where they travel, I feel that somehow I am there enjoying the trip as well.
Kind of like when your grandmother looks at the pictures of the children and grandchildren that live away from her, she looks at the say wedding album of a wedding she couldn’t attend, and stays looking at the same page for 20 or 30 minutes before changing to the next. I think this lets her feel as if she had been present at that wedding. And it makes her insanely happy.
She spends hours looking at the pictures and postings of what we do, and somehow that let’s her live those moments with us.
I am with you that very personal sentiments must remain private to have any sort of meaning. But as for all other events, I feel we can enjoy them more if we can share.
Bernardo says
Thanks for the comment, Juanita! Note that the post never says anything against memoir-writing per se, or even against Facebook. If you read through it again, you’ll see pretty clearly that I am talking about dangers that appear in using such technology. The abuse of a thing does not negate its proper use. But I think we all do need to keep our eyes open to the kind of trap I’m describing. Many people *do* share things on Facebook that are probably either not worth sharing or ought to be kept private (not necessarily because they are inappropriate, as because they are too valuable to make public). Maria Luisa, in destroying her letters, destroyed something that as her descendant I would have loved to read, something I would have cherished. But by doing so I also think she was protecting something that needed to be protected, so she would be able to cherish it as only she could have.
Alejandro Garcia Ceron says
I think “abuelita Marirusa””, the name that we, the grandsons, gave her when we were learning to talk, was as reserved in her private feelings as my mother, or even more. If she had lived today probably she wouldn’t be in FB nor ever had taken a selfie. But thanks God my exiled sisters, son and nephews are there so we can know a little about their lifes.
Alejandro Garcia Ceron says
And thanks, Berny, I really enjoyed reading your article.
Alejandro Garcia Ceron says
Others would call her “Rurirusa”, depending on the speaking skills reached.
Juanita Baranowski says
Berni, yes, I understood what you meant, that is exactly why I ask the question, to shade light into the type of memoirs he wrote.
I would say most of my FB friends don’t post personal intimate things in FB. They do post pictures like the one in the beach you describe, and I think posting something like that is of value for many. Your point is valid, I am sure there are plenty of people that live to post, but I think they are in the minority amongst adults. Teenagers or people people in their early 20’s are more likely to live their lives through FB as you describe. And if the pictures of the little children in my life start to disappear from FB you are going to be made personally responsible and will have to bring such children to Plano more often. Dije!
Bernardo says
I think this conversation proves what I said before: the Garcias feel strongly about family history.
Roseanne T. Sullivan says
Bernardo,
I enjoyed reading this blog quite a bit. I became a sharer in your desire to know more about your grandmother. And after you realized that you were denied the information that her letters would have given you, you were eventually able to come to a resolution that helped to put her decision to burn her letters in an interesting light. She protected her marriage by not making it public.
Some people are private people. So I’m told. I can hardly conceive of being that way, since I was so much interested in writing about my life that I earned an M.A. with a creative writing emphasis in my early 30s and studied and wrote most of the pieces that made it into my thesis as short memoirs under the direction of a well-known memoirist.
My mentor made her reputation by her exquisite writing, helped quite a bit by earning an MFA at the famous University of Iowa writing school and all the connections that are made there. I still have trouble accounting for how she was able to publish her first memoir before she was 30.
Also baffling me as a reader who likes facts, she wrote then and continues to write her New York Times-reviewed memoirs, deftly weaving a coverlet of words around the fact that she really doesn’t seem to want to reveal any of the details that usually fascinate about a person’s private life. Think of the contraditions. A memoirist who is a private person with no fame to make her life story interesting for fans, and a reluctance to tell all, or even to tell hardly anything at all. But she writes so well and so charmingly, you hardly notice.
She told us in classes that memoir writing is not truth telling. Somewhere between the event happening and the event having happened, she tells wannabe memoirists, memoir leaves the realm of historical fact and becomes a creative act, more literature than journalism.