In Response to "Memory and Imagination"

Patricia Hampl writes in I Could Tell You Stories about the value of one’s imagination and the power of a memoir. In a chapter entitled “Memory and Imagination,” Hampl declares, “Refuse to write your life and you have no life (34).” This statement seems alarming, but Hampl is correct. We exist only in how others perceive us, and if others are not aware of us, how can we be sure we exist? In her memoir How to Tame a Wild Tongue, Gloria Anzaldúa explains how sometimes she feels as if her knowledge of both the English language and the Spanish language are ruining each other. She writes, “… I feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one (42).” Because we relate to each other through our stories, when someone is unable to tell their stories, they cannot share their experiences and therefore make their reality known. Like Gloria, they are metaphorically cancelled out through their inability to articulate their thoughts and experiences.
Hampl goes on to write, “True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world (35).” Anzaldúa hints that she is writing How to Tame a Wild Tongue to connect with fellow Chicanos. She is writing her memoir to reach out to her world. And, indeed, her world, though unsteady, is found. She describes how she became aware of other Chicanos through the publication of the Chicano book I Am Joaquín and the formation of the Texas party la Raza Unida. “With that recognition, we became a distinct people. Something momentous happened to the Chicano soul— we became aware of our reality and acquired a name and a language (Chicano Spanish) that reflected that reality.” By announcing their existence and story, Chicanos existed outside of their own reality and were known to others. Chicanos were truly present in the world.
In the final pages of “Memory and Imagination,” Hampl explains that “[t]he authority of memory is a personal confirmation of selfhood… (36).” Through our memory and our language, we tell our stories and share our experiences. When we share our stories, we claim our own reality and inform others of it. Likewise, when we are told the experiences of others, we are being informed of another’s reality. Stories and language are needed to create a common reality-like life where all of us can exist. Without our shared experiences, we would continue to live in our perceptions. In another chapter of Hampl’s book, “Red Sky in the Morning,” she says, “Maybe a reader’s love of memoir is less an intrusive lust for confession than a hankering for the intimacy of this first-person voice, the deeply satisfying sense of being spoken to privately (19).” These private words people tell us are their stories, and we need these stories, yearn for them, so that we can further understand ourselves and make our reality known.