As I organized my bookshelves the last couple of days, I came across a dozen or so old journals, each unique in its size, design and color. Some are thinner, hard cover bound with lined pages, and some are wrapped in a cloth or vinyl, with unlined sketch book pages. While they all differ from each other in appearance, there is a common thread than unifies them. They are all blank save for the first few couple of pages, all chronicling my inability to tell my story of war and survival.

I have been purchasing these books since I came to Chicago, I guess one per a year, probably as a part of a New Year resolution. I do not remember exactly. In some of them I am struggling with the motive for writing my memoir. Often I write of a need to tell my story in order to piece my memory and myself back together. In a few of them I talk about the telling of my story as a way to become whole again and reclaim my life.

In several of the journals I am engaging in “an ordinary pursuit of a perfect format for my story. A novel, for example, would be too long. Would an average reader want to read for hours the mundane details of a struggle to keep sane amidst complete destruction?” Reading through these pages, I soon realized that my focus on motive and form helped keep me silent. I began to question this lack of a voice.

Early in childhood I was developing a strong and clear personal voice. I always felt a strange excitement whenever I had a writing assignment in school. I wrote panoramic descriptions with flourish, and wrote plots with gusto. Sure, my teachers knew that during “the storm on mount Igman, while window shutters slammed against the building with a brute force of an overjoyed four year old stomping her feet on the playground,” fairies did not appear whispering secret messages that only I could hear.

Nevertheless, they encouraged my flowery verses and crazy plots, and I loved the adrenaline rush and shortness of breath caused by the speed of my writing once I caught the rhythm of my imagination. This playful relationship with language abruptly stopped with the War during which I focused all of my cognitive resources on survival.

Once I started college in Chicago, I rekindled the relationship with language, this time developing my academic voice into a powerful one. I enjoyed learning the mechanics of formal language that allowed me to explore abstract ideas and connections, without a possibility of being hurt. Soon, this became my primary voice and it worked well for me since my life at that time centered on the pursuit of education.

However this voice is not the one that I could use to tell my story. I mean, to relate the truth of war and its layered and deep impact on survivors, I would have to dig deep inside and for that I need a personal voice, one that I believed did not function in the English language. What I failed to see is that just like the language acquisition; literacy is a process rather than the event. In this sense, I have to escape the refuge of my academic voice, and allow myself to forge an emotional relationship with this new language in order to become fully literate. I hope to find the voice that will tell the story of survival and will aid me in recovery. Writing, I expect, will help me become whole again.