WHO ARE YOU? by Jesse Lee Kercheval
“Who were you before you were told who to be?”
It is a question my therapist asks me, maybe from the Big Book of Questions to Ask Clients, but all I can say is that I am not sure we are anyone without our societal constraints.
She says, “Not we, you. Who are you when are you are not a professor?” She has forgotten I am retired now, but I let that go.
“A writer,” I say
“And when you can’t write anymore?”
“A mother. “
“And before you were a mother?”
“A wife.” I know – and you know – she went on.
“A sister,” I say. From the moment I was born, I was a sister.
“And if your sister dies?”
“I will write about it,” the circularity of it making me dizzy.
“And before you could write?”
* * *
Birthday (noun): the anniversary of something starting or being founded.
I was born on the 27th of July, 1956, in Fontainebleau, France. I was born by Cesarean section but will not lie to you and say I remember what that was like. I have a tiny color Kodak slide of my mother holding me. Looking at it, Baby Me does not look in the least familiar. I do not think – ah there I am. That is who I am. The only thing I recognize is the gold Swiss watch on my mother’s wrist. I still have it – a Patek Philippe. I am wearing it now. Without lifting my wrist to my ear, I can hear its soft ticking.
* * *
A friend, another writer, tells me she is not sure she wants to write any more. “I think,” she tells me, “I’m done with that. I just don’t have the energy anymore.”
I say, “I don’t think I’m done writing yet – but I can see how that could happen.”
I imagine aging as a process of letting go. Already I cannot remember many things – being born, for example. So why do I want to write, keep stitching events together; why this constant need to try to make sense of life when the sutures look as obvious and unnatural as Boris Karloff’s in the 1931 Frankenstein? Why can’t I just live each day then let each night be the end of it?
But then how would I ever figure out the answer to the question, “Who are you?”
I say those words Who are you? to another friend.
And she says, “Wow, the seminal Who album.”
I laugh. I had that album too. I can see the cover as clearly as if I were holding it in one teenage hand. The last album with Keith Moon as drummer and the four of them – Keith plus Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, John Entwistle – looking tough but so damn young on the cover.
“Also the title song,” I say. And we start to sing it, playing air guitar.
I cannot write the lyrics here without paying to use them if this is ever published (a writer’s thought for sure). But the lyrics are the title, repeated. Plus the word who alone roughly 99 times. And once the word fuck, which I enjoyed singing – loudly – when I was 12 and enjoy just as much now.
We repeat that line, laughing.
And then – after that conversation – I write this all down.
* * *
Birthday (noun): the day that is exactly a year or number of years after a person was born.
I have had 66 birthdays. In three months, I will have my 67th. When I think about it, I remember surprisingly few of them any better than I remember that first. But I do I remember my 16th birthday because my sister sewed me a granny dress – something that was very much in style then though just saying that name, “granny dress,” makes me wonder why. It was ankle length, and made of a soft, vaguely Victorian print cotton. Blue maybe? Or pink? With flowers. But I don’t really remember the dress clearly or, to be honest, ever wearing it. What I remember was being so moved by the act of her having made it. And how she gave it to me in a big box, gift wrapped with four bricks inside, so I wouldn’t guess what was in it. As if I could have guessed.
My sister is not well now, does not sew now. She may or may not remember that dress.
But I am still her sister and she is still mine.
If I did not write down this memory, it would cease to exist. But the truth is even these words are unlikely to outlive us.
* * *
If you google “How to Answer the Question Who Are You?” the number one suggestion is to try an online personality test. If you google “Online personality test” the first result is “100 online personality tests you can take now.”
I try the first one on the list, one that says it is based on Jungian analysis. I take it one time, choosing red/orange as my favorite color – thinking of all the red I have been using lately when I am drawing.
The answer it gives for “Who am I?” is: The Loyal Friend.
I take it again, choosing black as my favorite color – thinking of all the black I wear, the house color of artists and writers.
Somehow choosing black tilts me over into: The Lively Center of Attention.
I look at the test’s list of possible selves. I would have thought choosing black might have plunged me down to The Careful Plodder – surely a self no one really aspires to. But apparently it got me bonus points.
Maybe in the end, on my deathbed – no longer a writer – I could rest easy as The Loyal Friend.
Or maybe like many a good writer, I will use words to be The Lively Center of Attention to the end. Like Oscar Wilde: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”
Or Gertrude Stein: “What is the answer? . . .
“In that case, what is the question?”
* * *
Birthday (noun): the anniversary of the day on which a person was born, typically treated as an occasion for celebration and the giving of gifts.
I also remember my 27th birthday. I’d hitch-hiked to Venice with the boy who would be my husband in a few years. He was 26, just a few months younger than me, and so not really a boy, but in my memory he seems like one. He’d been in Venice before. I had not. What 170 I remember is just standing there, on a narrow bridge over a green, shining canal, houses leaning in over the water. The canal ran into a larger canal, then another. Venice seemed like another planet to me, like Mars with its imaginary canals. Or Venice seemed like my first sight of the world, any world, like being born again and finding out we were all dolphins.
Birth day, a day of feeling reborn.
Maybe every birthday was like that, even the ones I cannot remember.
Maybe every day should be like that.
* * *
Last night I dreamed I was drawing a self-portrait. I was trying to get my face right. I decided to make it more abstract, using heavy charcoal shading, instead of more realistic, because realism – clearly – was beyond my abilities. But in that dream world way, other things kept pulling me away from the easel, kept me from concentrating so it was like fighting a current while trying to draw underwater, as if I were a mermaid performing in the Weeki Wachee Springs in the Florida of my childhood. Or maybe like trying to become me while underwater inside my mother, still in the womb. In the end, in the dream, I decided to put glasses on the face so everyone would know it is me. I always wear glasses, that is who I am. The sister, the girl, the woman, the wife, mother, the writer – always in glasses.
Except, I remember when I wake up, I didn’t wear glasses until I was ten.
* * *
When my mother-in-law was tested for the Alzheimer’s, one of the things she was asked to do was to draw the hands on a clock then add the numbers of the hours in their correct positions. What she did – apparently typical of dementia patients – was clump all the numbers at the top, as if the clock were underwater and all the letters had floated.
Time passes, time comes unstuck, time loses all meaning. But when did time start?
Who were we before someone told us who we were?
* * *
Birthday (noun): From Middle English birthdai, birtheday, from Old English g˙ebyrddæg˙. Eclipsed non-native Middle English nativitee, from Old French nativité, nativited, from Latin naˉtıˉvitas.
I look again at the slide of me as a newborn, hold it up to the light. In that moment Who was I?
A being breathing air for the first time. A being held in her mother’s arms for the first time. No words for air or arms or mother. I would say a being seeing the world for the first time, but my eyes are closed.
I imagine in that moment hearing my heart beat, familiar from the womb. Hearing my mother’s watch, so close to my ear. That soft ticking.
If I keep the watch on my wrist, if someone remembers to wind it for me, that might be who I am in the end.
A woman who hears time ticking.
But if it stops, I’ll still hear my heart beating. I will hear that until it stops, until the moment when I can no longer hear anything at all.
And then I will be no one.
Or I will be these words on the page.
Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer, and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her latest book is the poetry collection I Want To Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). Her prose books include the memoir Space (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). Her essays have appeared in Guernica, The Sewanee Review, New Letters, Brevity, and New England Review.