The Mending Time

Review by Theodore Richards

The Mending Time, the wonderful debut novel from Meta Commerse, is fundamentally about the healing process.

Like any good novel, it is centered on questions: How does healing happen, collectively and individually, physically and spiritually? Commerse recognizes that the most important questions cannot ever be fully answered. But part of the answer, one finds, is that we are healed when we realize that we are in this together, that our wounds bind us more than isolate us. Our individual struggles are not separate from the collective.

Set across three generations on Chicago’s south side, the novel takes on the difficult subject of the abuse of women and children. Skillfully linking the abuse within the community to the broader abuse that the community as a whole faces, Commerse recognizes that the wounded men who often harm the women in their lives do so in part because of the failure of their society to give black men a voice. And she celebrates the strength of women who realize that, when they start talking about it, they are connected by their pain.

The novel is structured, quite intentionally, in the four-fold pattern of an African healing ritual. This speaks to the importance of intergenerational participation in the healing process. A whole world is required to heal a single child; that is, the individual requires a community as well as the ancestors to become whole. The central character, Bea, a child who has faced horrible abuse, finds healing by connecting to older generations and to the healing traditions of her ancestors.

Commerse is a writer who works to get to the marrow of issues and to stay there until the healing is done, and her writing brings with it a tremendous amount of depth and skill. Although she has relocated to Asheville, NC, she is from Chicago, and the work evokes a South Side of days gone by, before communities were disrupted by the violence and mass incarceration of the 1980s and the gentrification of today. This is not to say that segregated Chicago is idealized. This is a hard life, and its struggles come through.

Healing, for a wounded little girl or a wounded people or a wounded species, also happens through storytelling. This is part of the power of a good novel, and part of the power of those in The Mending Time who find their voice. The one thing we fear—reliving our pain by telling the story—is that which heals us. And while the book begins by burying the bloody shirt of the man who saves a beaten woman, it concludes when the child is ritually freed to tell her story, no longer building psychological “walls” around herself.

The Mending Time, the flagship offering of Story Medicine Asheville Publications, was released in the fall of 2014.

Theodore Richards is a poet, writer, and religious philosopher. He is founder and executive director of The Chicago Wisdom Project and author of the poetry collection, Handprints on the Womb.