In THE DREAM MANAGER, Matthew Kelly says about dreams “we love them, we fear them, we yearn for them and we avoid them.” I ask, “What happens when you are unaware of a dream?”
In the 1960’s and 70’s, I knew poets, authors, and playwrights. I clicked my fingers in applause after coffee house performances, but I never called myself or dreamed of being a writer.
Then I moved to Monrovia, Liberia. After only eight months in the tropical paradise and the birth of my first son, then Master Sergeant Samuel Doe assassinated President William R. Tolbert and murdered thirteen cabinet members in a seaside execution. I stayed four years after the coup because of the people, the land, and because my business West African Clerical Services boomed. I was a midwife and I delivered more than twenty babies, including one from a circumcised woman.
One day in Monrovia, I ate falafel and hummus in a dimly lit Lebanese restaurant while reading the Daily Observer Newspaper and wondering if it was time to give up on Liberia. There, reading stories about bans on imported rice, poverty, political party mergers, and failed insurgents, somewhere in my gut the thought occurred that there was some greater purpose for this experience. Writer or not, these experiences were the makings of a story, a play, something. I gathered newspapers, photographs, letters and cards, a Peace Corps Manual, random receipts, and stuffed them into a box.
Back in the States, I asked a playwright friend to review what I had collected and collaborate with me on a project. She replied, “Thembi, this is your story to tell.” Having no dream to be a writer, I re-boxed everything and raised my sons.
Twenty years later, facing a personal crossroads, I rediscovered the box. Amazingly, when I opened it, I seemed to catch the scent of Liberia’s salt-water humidity that represented rainy season. With the sight of yellowing papers and memorabilia that marked a past life of idealism, of naiveté, a dream ignited.
I realized that the unconscious unfolding of my novel began in that Lebanese restaurant and required the twenty years of living to develop the perspective and voice that were indeed mine to share. The passion to breathe life into Liberia’s human condition, find the extraordinary in the ordinary, and put it all to paper became my yearning. FREE SOIL is finished and will be released July 2010. Ahhh!
Whether they begin as a gut response, a glimpsing, or a humongous energetic pull, dreams are a vision of the future begging evidence. We must embrace and nurture them. Langston Hughes in The Dream Keeper wrote Bring me all of your dreams, you dreamer. Bring me all your Heart melodies that I may wrap them in a blue-cloud cloth away from the too-rough fingers of the world.
