Summer 2004

My Family, My Self

Email Story

Samantha Ferm

Home: Mesa, Arizona

Major: English

I.S. Title: Monsoon Memory: Tales From a Distant Home

Adviser: Joanne Frye

Samantha Ferm thought she would write an I.S. that collected her grandmother’s colorful stories. Raised in British India, Ferm’s grandmother brought her Hindi tongue, exotic foods, and tales of adventures with her when she moved in with Samantha and her family in Mesa, Arizona, years ago.

But with the guidance of her adviser, Joanne Frye (English), Ferm’s I.S. grew into much more than just a recounting of a grandmother’s tales. Frye, who is at work on a memoir and is interested in mother-daughter relationships, convinced Ferm that readers care much more about a memoir when the narrator relates the events and characters to herself. As Ferm began to transcribe the hours of tapes that she recorded last fall and winter with her grandmother, "I realized that the story was as much about me as it was about her."

The result, "Monsoon Memory: Tales From a Distant Home," is an absorbing, beautifully written story of a college-aged daughter exploring her mixed-race identity as she learns about her grandmother’s history in India and Pakistan. We read of the adventures of a spirited young woman decades ago, during a time of political unrest in India. But Ferm also shows us how her grandmother tells the stories, what she avoids and where she goes off on tangents. Ferm writes of what her home smells like as her grandmother cooks, how it felt to grow up with her, and how Ferm feels as she pieces together her heritage.

The evocative writing flows easily, but it is the product of plenty of work. Last fall Ferm read her fill of memoirs by women, fiction by Indian women writers, and books on how to write memoirs. Transcribing the interviews with her grandmother was tedious work, as was choosing which stories to include and how to organize them.

"From the beginning, Professor Frye was so excited about my project. She recommended that I keep an I.S. journal as I read. She pushed me to find myself in the stories, telling me that my voice is the one the reader will trust.

"Grandma’s a natural born storyteller, with a flair for the dramatic. She’d be honest with me about fights in the family and things like that, then say, ‘Don’t put this in.’ With the more difficult issues, I had to push her – like about what it was like to grow up in British India, and what her relationship with her husband was like."

Ferm begins the I.S. in the present as she writes about searching for her identity as an Indian and American. Then she writes about herself as a grade schooler, with the presence of her grandmother in her home. She tells the story of her grandmother’s grandmother, "a family legend that I kind of play with," about a princess who was kidnapped, lost at sea in a storm, taken in by a minister on the shores of Mangalore, in southern India, and married a local man. The stories move forward in time, telling of her grandmother’s courtship and marriage, children, an escape to Pakistan, and more.

"In my research, I learned that the questions that make you angry are the powerful stories. For me, asking about my uncle’s and grandfather’s deaths was hard. I cried as I was transcribing those notes. It’s my first confrontation with death, really. And I was mourning for people I’d never met."

Her last chapter is "a conversation between my mother and me about my grandmother." Ferm’s mother has only been to India once, and says one day she’d like to take Samantha there. She planned to read her daughter’s I.S. on the plane home from Ohio after graduation. Then Grandma will read it.

"I have a feeling my grandmother will love it," Ferm says, "but inevitably there will be something that she doesn’t like or that she doesn’t think I should have included."

"It feels like I accomplished something that I didn’t know I was meant to accomplish," Ferm says of her I.S., which earned honors. "As for my identity, I’m still searching. This project was just an introduction to my searching."

Ferm is home in Arizona now, working and saving money with hopes of going abroad. She may put her Spanish minor to use, she says. "I’ve been given so many opportunities, I just want to give something back."

"Samantha has a hunger for the larger world," says Frye, "and she wants to satisfy that hunger before she locks into a career path. She’s also got a hunger for the greater good, in the largest sense."