Marrow Memory
The collection of essays titled, “Marrow Memory,’ by Dr. Margaret Nowaczyk is a body of literature emblazed with exquisite writing and a prominent narrative voice that captivated and inspired me throughout my reading. Dr. Nowaczyk presents an organic and unique authorial voice that glows in her knowledge of science, memory and encounter with nature resulting in a beautiful narrative of self-exploration like no other text I have read. “Marrow Memory” will remain a checkpoint of literature for me throughout my own writing.
Dr. Nowaczyk is brilliant in grounding her language between the literary and scientific, in memory, she is able to provide molecular changes and the behaviour of the body that occurs within the microscopic. Her representation of the biochemical and physiological with the psychological and metaphysical is in the author’s words, “the skin of existence.” Memories, in this narrative, are articulated as being written onto our DNA, “tiny one-carbon methyl molecules attach to the DNA chain and influence the three-dimensional coiling of the double helix. Like barnacles that cover the rungs of a ship's ladder.” This reconfiguring, the changing of memory with DNA is what Dr. Nowaczyk calls, “Marrow Memory.”
Dr. Margaret Nowaczyk is a pediatric clinical geneticist and a professor at McMaster University and Degroote School of Medicine. She is a writer who has appeared in Canadian, Polish and American journals and anthologies. Dr. Nowaczyk lives in Hamilton, Ontario. She can be found at www.margaretnowaczyk.ca.
“Marrow Memory” is made-up of 21 essays including a Preface that trace a story of memory, navigation of Polish childhood, immigration and acclimation to the Canadian landscape. Encased within this collection is an overarching thread that bookends Dr. Nowaczyk’s writing experience with the disruption of Covid to her profession. The profound effects of the pandemic propelled a re-orientation and introduction of the author to herself, to her patients and to her readers.
I was pulled into the seamless trance of the author’s descriptive language that transported me through various portals of exploration and knowing. This descriptive language and vivid imagery were deeply-rooted in the connection between the body, psychology, genealogy, memory and nature resulting in a holistic way of being that inspires me in this reading.
Dr. Nowaczyk’s use of colour alone allowed me to seamlessly enter her world. She describes various beaches like the Baltic Sea with enchanting imagery. “I have a memory of holding onto somebody's sinewy back - my grandfather's? - as he swam, or maybe waded in salty water. Pale beige dunes traced the horizon behind a wooden pier. Gulls cawed over waves topped with silvery foam. Far from tropical, the cold Baltic was more grey than blue - gunmetal-blue. Dark gold sand layered upon a bed of tiny pebbles about six inches below the surface.” The use of the word ‘sinewy,’ the dunes being ‘pale beige,’ and a horizon behind a ‘wooden and buttery yellow pier’ culminate in masterful writing. ‘Silvery foam’ and ‘gunmetal-blue,’ I was planted there on the beach with her, and from thereon I journeyed with her.
She introduced me to the texture and fluidity of Henri Matisse’s textile art created in his apartment in Paris. The vividness of depicting the creative process and connection to memory of nature deepened my reading experience to enter more fully for later engagement with the text and Dr. Nowaczyk’s microscopic lens of the human experience. She summarizes Matisse’s living art installation in his apartment: “was Matisse remembering the Tahitian twilight during those sleepless nights in Paris? Maybe the colours of the tropics saturated his charcoal nights the way they filled my grey childhood days. Did he hear the breeze tousling the palm fronds and the waves lapping the coral reefs under the starry equatorial sky? Maybe the stiff paper reminded him of the rough edges of coral he fingered in Tahiti, the crunch of scissors of the crunch of shells under his feet on the beach. Memories rising up from the deep crevices of the subconscious like strings of air bubbles racing to the surface of the sea.” Alive and with movement, the text of “Marrow Memory” did similar for me, rough edges and tousled textile, I felt invigorated. “It is the combination of the sound and of the scent of briny seawater - the iodine, other microelements - and the breeze that brings those scents into my olfactory bulbs to resonate in my limbic system, in the deep emotional pathways of the brain.” Memory is not just rooted in an abstract cloudy cognitive space, but deeply grounded in physiology. We embody memory, an enrapturing organic adaptation, evolution of existence.
Dr. Nowaczyk ties in childhood memories this way, a delicate negotiation of language, immigration experience, acclimation and adaptation to Canadian society. First, there is the challenge with the pronunciation of her name. Like many immigrants in Canada she settles for Margaret. “You instruct your new classmates and teachers how to pronounce your Polish name - maw-goh-JAH-tah. They mangle it and say: "It's beautiful." After a year of suffering their garbled utterances, you begin to introduce yourself as Margaret. No more exotica - you want to blend in, to belong, in name if not in anything else.” There is a painful splice in identity. “No matter how many times I tried to teach them, native English speakers could not pronounce Małgorzata correctly.” On official paper she is Malgorzata, but Margaret as a medical student, as a pediatric resident and a clinical geneticist. Margaret, as a professor at McMaster University. Her colleagues know her by her English name. Her friends. Her readers. And, her husband. There is a subtle motif with the collection, a cycling through and spiraling around to introductions, each time, the reader knows the author differently. “It's a bit confusing, isn't it? So let me introduce myself. I’m Dr. Margaret Nowaczyk, a pediatric clinical geneticist and a writer. Nice to meet you.”
Despite the assimilation to Canadian society, “Marrow Memory” lets us know Małgorzata. There is a memory of a young girl attuned to a radio program in rural Poland. In weaving the molecular knowledge of the transmission of sound through airwaves, the electromagnetic waves like “a community of souls,” can be sent from so far away to reach even membrane and eardrum. Vibrations that entered a little Polish girl’s room, “this progression of information from sound waves to fluid waves translated through electrical impulses into conscious thought falls just this side of magical. But this intertwined dance of physics and neural impulses does not explain the emotional responses to music or sound, what we experience when we hear a tune from our childhood.” Listening to Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You, Baby,” Dr. Nowaczyk surfaces the nostalgia of innocent escapism through broadcast from the remoteness of location. Her investment in plotline and character development clicked off on her ‘little Grundig’ when the story didn’t end the way she wanted. What is at stake? Perhaps the nourishment of a young writer’s imagination, but for the author, it was feeling a part of something more immense, bigger.
Bigger like another memory of a book that was passed through rural Poland, from hand to hand until the book, “The Art of Loving” by Michalina Wistocka was held by a young Małgorzata. A controversial manual on sex education, written by a woman, published in Communist Poland in 1978. “My mother had thrust the borrowed paperback at me earlier that summer. "I might as well give it to you, you'll ferret it out anyway," she had said, sounding angry.” A memory hinged on the cusp of womanhood, femininity and sexual identity, this book had informed and empowered a young woman. A writing woman risking censor in her times, her text rose and influenced society nonetheless. The power of a writing woman. The power of a scientific woman advocating for female empowerment.
Brought through to an experience of Covid and lockdown, I very much felt this collection of essays was birthed and ushered through from this time. The power of one memory shared enabled reclamation of Polish heritage and was simply an enjoyable read. Dr. Nowaczyk speaks about yearning for krochmal during her times returning to ironing during lockdown. The author recalls her stiff and clean hanging childhood sheets. “I reminisce about krochmal, the dripping windowpanes, the rolling cylinder at the magiel. The clean scent of boiling detergent and of the basement drying room.” She goes out and finds potato starch and hopes for the best with her 21st century washing machine; nothing like the process and care of washing done with the technology of domestic labours her grandmother had access to. “Two hours later, the laundry comes out of drum squeaking slightly - I remember that sound! - as I pile it into my brand-new wicker basket bought online from Etsy from Bosnia (a pandemic purchase) and carry it to dry on the deck.” The final crunch of the sheets described in this memory, a coming home.
Dr. Nowaczyk further layers this transformation with exposure to and learning she completed through ‘narrative medicine’ which plays on the author’s own identity and telling her story to her reader. In carrying out close readings, a text’s plot, character and narrative point-of-view were brought to the forefront. In turning out the mechanics of a text, Dr. Nowaczyk learned of the “assumptions and preconceptions [that] may interfere with medical history taking and, as a result, with reaching the correct diagnosis.” The key in narrative medicine is empowering medical professionals to become attuned to their patient, sometimes giving them space to tell their story is more important than a clinical diagnosis. That is the magic of “Marrow Memory,” a telling of a story in order we come to know the writer, deeper and more empathetically each turn-around of a plotline. “"Hi, I’m Dr. Nowaczyk," I said to the middle-aged woman sitting on the examining table. "It's so nice to meet you."”
Thank you to Dr. Margaret Nowaczyk, Wolsak & Wynn and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in request for an honest review!
