REEMA ZAMAN I Am Yours

Your writing voice is extraordinarily intimate and evocative, but also fierce. Was the skill always there for you or did it take a while to develop as you began to embrace solitude and your “inner lonely child,” as you say? From the very beginning of writing I Am Yours, my goal was to create a manual of healing for myself and anyone else who needs and reads it. I knew that for the voice of the book to be sincerely and lastingly effective in its healing, it had to be soft and tender when appropriate, and steely and protectively fierce when appropriate, rightfully enraged on behalf of the reader and myself toward the wounds inflicted on us by an abusive partner, relative, or society at large. In essence, the voice had to be that of a wise, loving, loyal guardian.

Finding this voice wasn’t a matter of developing it; it was an act of reclaiming it. The radical intimacy and ferocity you hear in I Am Yours is my authentic voice. Today, there isn’t a difference or separation between my lived-and-spoken voice and my writing voice. However, for the first 30 years of my life, my voice had been forcefully changed to appease those around me, mainly men. For 30 years, I lived and spoke in response and reaction to the patriarchal male appetite, agenda, needs, and gaze.

Writing I Am Yours was a journey of reclamation of my truest, full-throated voice. The line that speaks to this most fittingly is when my mother asks me why I chose to not date while writing the memoir, and I reply, “I’m trying to hear what my voice sounds like without having to consider a man’s.” I think most women can identify with the contortion of one’s voice, self, psyche, and body, all to please and mollify the men in their lives, be it their father, partner, or the patriarchy surrounding us. The inner lonely child is a result and manifestation of that contortion—the contortion forces us to wound, fracture, and reject certain parts of who we are.

So, as I wrote and revisited every memory, as I healed the past and thus my inner lonely child, I was able to reunite all the pieces of my truest self. The intimacy and ferocity you hear in my writing is authentic to the breadth and depth of not only myself but most women. We women aren’t one-dimensional beings. We are multidimensional, complex, both soft and steely, loving and fierce. Reuniting with and owning the full-throated power of our voices is the journey we must embark if we want to rise and live as our truest, most healed, most centered, most alive selves. By reclaiming my voice, I have found my power. Your Southeast Asian childhood and extensive travels shaped you in many ways, no doubt. Was all this motion by design? The motion of continual travel was not by design—it was the result and response to trauma, to feeling I did not have or deserve a home. That being said, I’m enormously grateful that I have experienced so many travels, and that so much of that motion has included enormous adversity. I’ve been steeled and softened by my travels. I’ve been part of so many cultures, economic brackets, lifestyles, industries, and families. Being deeply involved in diverse groups and, at times, harrowing settings has led to perspective, humility, maturity, and empathy. Empathy is a muscle; the more we access it, the stronger it grows. Empathy becomes our one, constant state.

Being part of so many cultures has taught me humankind is one large family. It has made me fall in love with our larger family in a sincere, unaffected way. This love has helped me heal trauma, alleviate lonesomeness, and turn wound into wisdom. It allows me to understand and stand strong in my purpose; I was born to be a voice for the stories and souls silenced. The many passages about your parents—your relationship with each, their devotion to each other—are especially compelling. At one point you write: “I am in love with their love.” As a person, what do you owe your parents? I owe my parents, all three of them, volumes that cannot be quantified. My mother and I often say that I grew into the woman she needed me to be. My mother is my muse and my reason. My father is my inspiration, the sun after which I’m racing, the person and the story I’ve tried hardest to understand. My stepdad has been the earth upon which we’ve built a home. He has been a force of constancy, stability, and grounding in our lives, as well as laughter, joy, and lightness.

My mom and dad gave me a home while I wrote I Am Yours, literally and emotionally. I hypothesised that by being around the gorgeous, warm, unwavering love that they share, I would be able to heal so much of my past by seeing my mother happy. The impact that a mother’s silence, sorrow, trauma, or fear will have on a child cannot be underestimated. In numerous ways, the child will grow in reaction to that negative space, and be stunted by it.

At age 30, seeing my mother talk and laugh and eat and breathe, I learned to do the same. I felt, observed, and learned authentic love and security, as a child and as a woman. In the future, when I look for a partner, I now have the tools to make wise decisions. Moreover, a gift I didn’t foresee was that by being around such warmth, laughter, kindness, and stability, I was able to feel so safe as to start plumbing the most vulnerable and dark caves of my past. Being around my mom and dad, feeling their love for each other and toward me, played an enormous role in my gaining the courage to write with radical vulnerability. They helped me access my truest voice. The tenderness and ferocity that are so central to I Am Yours and to my voice, are, simply put, the result of love.