When the narration produces narration: haiku that overstep time and space

an article written by Roberta Invernizzi

Roberta Invernizzi
Roberta Invernizzi

Happens to find yourself in situations that interrogate you, that bite, that force you to discuss with yourself about preferences, attitudes and inclinations that you hold to be true and that you expressed apodictically on occasion. For example: “I don’t love poetry”. Because I don’t understand it, because I felt inadequate, reminds me too much school and all the thing that I had to learn by memory, I’ve the fear to minimize it, I approach to the verses with diffidence or with an annoying sensation of nudity. For years you brush amazing territories without awareness. But then, it happens. The project work that ask me to elaborate for the Master in Applied Narrative Medicine of ISTUD will have the main theme the organs donation: since a long time it’s an essential topic for me. I remember the discussions, when I was younger, to support the cause of the donation against all the selfish indifference a bit ignorant that too many times emerged in the inappropriate talks about life and death.

I will count on the openness of some doctors and nurses of two structures of the Biella’s ASL: Nephrology and Dialysis and Intensive Care. So, the focus will be pointed on the donation and the transplantation of kidneys. Even if who will donate didn’t look at the moneys that came out from his pocket: as much as possible, without forget cents (the are never only cents…). About what concerns the one that aren’t “professionals of the care”, I should meet people that are waiting for a kidney (since few time or since long time), people that already received a kidney in donation and that now are living better or not; and then I should meet people that says “yes: I agree” to the explant of the organ of a relative. That means a husband or a wise, a son or a daughter, a father or a mother. Often suddenly, always too early. When the thought that grips you isn’t about the “others” (that, for example, are waiting for an organ), but a thought about your and him, you and her.

I’m touched by the perspective to get closer at the pain of the wait and of the farewell. Will not be the first time that I’ll met people that are facing disease and death.

But which draft structure? I want a unique drat for all my interlocutors, to realize transvers analysis and comparisons. However, the points of view, the perspectives about the experience of donation are really different, involve different dimensions: I don’t want to “force”. While I’m reflecting about the possible options, came back the memory of a little “experimentation” that, time ago, I’ve tried in the department of SPDC – Psychiatry that I often visit for some lectures that I do like volunteer: to try to stimulate the attention and the participation of patients reunited in the break room, I’ve proposed the lectures of some haiku. Picked up from texts of the centuries-old Japanese tradition and also from modern and western texts, particularly the ones of Jack Kerouac. Short poetic compositions, 17 syllables divided in three verses (two quinarys and one heptasyllabic), immediate like a photo, with an intense evocative and suggestive power, dense and fresh. Usually they draw, through few words tossed in the silence, situations and actions in a naturalistic context (animals, vegetables, mineral elements, panoramas), with the connotation of a precise season.

That afternoon, the little magic was immediate: started a kind of challenge not competitive for the development of the haiku, interpret it, draw a background, populate it, scrutinize it, and also contest it. That micro-narrations moved and solicited emotions and thoughts in different people, also at the cultural level, with fragilities that came from serious diseases and not, in an acute phase and not. So rise the idea, in me, that haiku, able to grab all the aspects that apparently seems marginal and residual of the universal experience of life, powerful “bridges” with who is living situations of fragility and pain; that this kind of narration without flesh and superficially “peaceful”, “balanced”, capable to talk both to the hearts and to the minds that are bleeding, with a minimal language and universally accessible. It’s not a coincidence that the great Zanzotto, during a period of deep psychological distress, used the composition of haiku like an instrument of self-help.

Here: my track will be a selection of haiku, that I will show both to the care operators, and to patients, and also to the caregivers of the death donors.

I find an author: I want to propose a “dialogue between narrations”, I think that it’s important the existence of a proximity between the existential path of the haiku’s author that will serve like “question” and the one of who will formulate “answers”. I choose Kobayashi Yōtarō, 1763-1827, monk with the name Issa (“cup of tea”) and marked by the experience of the disease and of the death since when he was a child: he lost the mother at 3 years old, the grandmother at 14 and, as adult, the wife and four children, still babies. The second wife left him alone, the third lived longer then him, giving birth to a little infant few months after the sudden death of Issa. The pain was the humus where his shining narration grown in poetic form, with also some humour (that it’s one of the coping strategies available to any human beings), focused upon the daily living and the simplicity, upon the compassion for the smaller and unarmed animals. So, a poet died 200 years ago…

I select ten haiku of Issa: I desire to offer a wide list of stirrings that narrators will be able to choose; the choice will be the object of reflections, because it’s possible that it will highlight possible convergences. The chosen haiku seems that contain an articulated range of emotions, although I understand that the expectations of the possible narrative developments are naturally all subjective, only mine. I read in those few verses the disorientation, the hope, the desperation, the solitude, the changing, the rage, the trust, the sweetness, the problematic relationship with the other, that sometimes disappoint and sometimes irritate. I recognise those elements, that seems to me functional in the creation of the stories that I looking for, also for contrast. Otherwise, I believe that the subjectivity of the choice in this planning phase it’s inevitable; I try to mitigate the effects foreseeing multiple tracks and no limits about the number to select and develop:

Text of the Haiku
How it’s strange

Also live like that

The shadow of flowers

Swallows of the evening

I got no hope

For tomorrow

The frog

Plays with me

Looking me intent

 

I say short words

If only I had an interlocutor…

Moon of middle autumn

Right world!

A lotus flower

Also for a pierced coin

World of sufferance:

Still the cherry-trees

Are in blossom

Solitude:

Everywhere I look

I see violets

At any gate

The spring starts

From the mud upon sandals

End of the year.

In any case

I rely on you.

In the dark night

I seem to see the snow

My nape hurts.

 

The results are of two kinds: narrations, in other words the texts that came from the tracks, and the reactions, also the ones that didn’t became narrations.

The retirement of availability of some key-subjects, caused by contextual personal management difficulties, limited the number of narrators and narrations. However, the material available, in other words 15 texts written by 5 authors, allowed the highlighting of some aspects that I consider interesting.

The dimensions that I’ve examined in any narration were two:

Linguistic: the key-words (because recurring or because seems to contain the total meaning of the text); the factual language (anchored to reality) or symbolic (proverb, metaphor, image); the verbal times (past – present – future);

Emotive: I’ve utilised the Plutchik[1] flower like an instrument of revelation and position of the “emotional signals” in the texts.

I’ve also attached to the narrations other analysis models of Narrative Medicine: Kleinman, to identify the prevalence of clinical or emotional aspects, Launer, to catch the movement of the stories, Bury, to understand the involvement of the narrator.

My principal focus was the investigation of the relations “track-development of the track”. Any narrations showed an absolutely singular living and didn’t came out significant similarities between the themes used by the one that chosen the same tracks: this fact reinforce my hypothesis of a huge potential evocative openness of the haiku, despite of their material scarceness and the affinity of the macro-themes involved in the research (organs donation).

In some cases, the track evoked a narration that pushed itself in territories clearly very distant from the explicit present elements, even if with the preservation of the contents pertinence; for example, a track mainly (exclusively) visual started, in one case, a narration mainly (significantly) auditive. Those situations showed the extreme plasticity of the haiku like narrative incentive.

Some words and expressions puts all their power and semantic opulence on the line: so the “evening” it’s the darkness, the death, the end of the day or of the experience; “justice” it’s assimilated to the “reparation” regarding to pain; the “end of the year” it’s the turning point, the conclusion of a season that didn’t have any bond with the calendar; the “you” of “I rely on you” for a patient it’s a plurality of subjects, in other words the time, the destiny, the Lord.

The language it’s both factual and symbolic, in a way that is pertinent to the personal style of expression of the narrator rather of the style of the tracks. The analysis models utilised proved to be complementary and efficient in taking to the light interesting elements and convergent for the understanding of the narrator’s feel, and they can offer a chance to identify and reinforce the ongoing coping strategies. Overall prevail the emotional living of the one that narrates themselves: the simplicity and the pragmatism of the tracks, orient to the essential, the internal.

The narrations of professionals of care are more “filtered”: the role seems imposing self-censure, bonds to the expectations we believe that there are about their narrations (for example the completeness terms, coherence). The stories of the patients and of the caregivers are more “free” and rich.

For what concern the reactions, there was an initial prevalent wonder, facing an “unexpected” type of track; most of the people involved expected a questionnaire or a half-structured traditional track, for example that touch key-themes related to the organs donations, like the difficult of the choice, our conception of “gift”, the reflections and the feelings raised from the perspective of hosting the part of the body of another person inside our body, the fear-hope dynamic. In the next phase, I felt the appreciation related to the chance of choosing the minimum of a track to develop. Some people narrates that the choice was very instinctive, immediate, because in this way “spring into action” associations and imagines and specific memories, evoked by verses. The writing was mainly “in one go”, not only between the one that didn’t practice regularly the narration: seems that kind of track oriented the typology of development. Something similar happened also for those people that preferred to develop oral tracks: their stories (n. 4), recorded and written down, came out from comparable associations and the verbal context allowed me to catch immediately the rapidity and the largeness of the returns and of the consequences, in a complex game, a spider web, in the memory and also in the projections about future.

One participant clarifies in this way his living: “It would have been surely more simple to have a traditional track, but I think that the result would have been different: more focused about the memory of events and less about the memory of the emotions liked to those. I’ve had the sensation that haiku brings me back immediately to the original feeling.”

It’s starting a project where I will apply the same methodology and the same track’s set, in my opinion usable like unitary instrument capable to include and harmonise simplicity and complexity, for the investigation of a different dimension of pain and bother.

Today I can say that I love the poetry that talks to everybody. I love poetry because it talks to everybody and let everybody talk.

 

[1] I. Matteucci. Comunicare la salute e promuovere il benessere. Teorie e modelli per l’intervento nella scuola. Franco Angeli Ed., 2014

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