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Fig Trees – A Childhood Lived in the Shadow of Murder
Marnie Ross’s Fig Trees is a memoir about childhood, memory, and the long reach of losing a parent violently. Ross was nearly eleven when her mother was murdered in the family’s Phoenix home in 1979, and that night becomes the dividing line of the book. But Fig Trees is interested in much more than the murder itself. Ross reconstructs the world around it: her sisters, her mother’s habits, school, birthdays, television shows, food, church, games, friendships, and the frightening instability that followed her mother’s death. Early in the memoir, Ross writes, “Memory isn’t a calendar.” That line becomes a useful way to understand the whole book. She’s telling the story as a person remembering childhood decades later, where certain details remain startlingly vivid while dates and sequences sometimes blur.
One of the book’s strongest qualities is the way Ross lets ordinary objects carry emotional weight. Bullet holes remain in curtains her mother made. A jigsaw puzzle becomes a memory of patience and tenderness. A piano becomes a way of trying to make her mother proud. The fig trees themselves grow into the book’s central image because they connect Ross to the everyday version of her mother, the woman who gardened, cooked, sewed, hummed, and cared for her children. These details give Jill, Ross’s mother, a presence beyond the fact of her death. Ross also includes excerpts from her mother’s letters home to Australia, which let readers encounter Jill’s humour, homesickness, curiosity, and growing unease in her own words. That choice adds another layer to the memoir because Ross isn’t simply remembering her mother as a child once knew her. She’s also meeting her again as an adult.
The chapters about life after the murder are especially affecting because Ross remembers childhood survival in such practical terms. Grief exists beside hunger, school lunches, Christmas presents, bruises, chores, television, and the constant effort to protect her younger sister Ayrlie. Some of the hardest passages describe Ross finding ways to get food for the two of them, whether through babysitting money or the quiet help of a friend who brought an extra lunch. Reflecting on that kindness, Ross describes love as “The kind with paper bags and silence.” It’s a small line, but it captures something the memoir returns to again and again. Care often appears through modest acts. The relationship among Ross and her sisters is especially important in this way. Their games, arguments, private worlds, and shared memories show children improvising their own forms of comfort when the adults around them can’t reliably provide it.
Ross’s style is direct, emotionally open, and strongly rooted in sensory memory. She remembers wallpaper patterns, the smell of food, television programs, pool water, songs, toys, the texture of objects, and the strange thoughts that occur to children during terrifying situations. Those childlike observations are often what make the darkest scenes feel convincing. The memoir also moves frequently between the child Ross was and the adult Ross interpreting what happened, so the reader sees both immediate experience and decades of reflection layered together. Its short, episodic chapters suit that approach. Ross accumulates memories until a fuller childhood emerges. Moments such as the imaginary “Club” she created with Ayrlie or the sisters’ stuffed-animal battles matter because they restore playfulness and personality to a story that could otherwise be defined entirely by trauma.
By the end, Fig Trees feels like an act of reconstruction. Ross is piecing together her mother, her sisters, and herself from memories, letters, objects, and stories that survived. The closing sections become more reflective, particularly as Ross considers the adult lives of the three sisters and writes directly to her mother. What stayed with me most was the memoir’s attention to the coexistence of grief and affection. Ross can remember fear and still remember laughter; she can describe cruelty while holding tightly to the people who offered kindness; she can mourn the childhood that ended while taking pleasure in the childhood moments that survived in memory. The fig trees are a fitting title because they come to represent exactly that mixture. They keep growing after Jill is gone, carrying both the ache of her absence and the evidence that she was there. That makes Fig Trees an intimate and deeply personal account of how a child remembers a mother and how those memories continue to change as the child grows older.
Pages: 245 | ASIN : B0GX2XFZWJ
Celebrating Small Victories
Lalibela is a book of poetry that wanders through memory, love, pain, Blackness, faith, and survival, shared through snapshots of memories filled with real emotions that hit the reader hard, and amplify the realities of Black life. What inspired you to write this particular collection of poems?
I am so grateful for the opportunity to talk about this collection.
This work was part of an intended series, picking up from where a previous work, Black Architects, left off. There was this and a prequel to Black Architects called Dearest. Unfortunately, the latter was stolen from my storage unit, but Lalibela survived. I was very much moved by my community and the struggles that I witnessed/experienced. When I look around me, there are people living unglorified lives, battling day in and day out to survive. I also see triumph, I see joy, I see grit, I see humor, I see love. The scene of backs breaking under hard work, celebrating on Sundays in church and lending a hand, set a very heartfelt rhythm in my mind. This was the rhythm to which my hands went to work to capture the sanctity of what we lived. The pieces, in turn, celebrate simply getting through the day and all other seemingly small victories.
I was also partly inspired by “Of the Coming of John” by W.E.B DuBois as well as the Allegory of the Cave by Plato. Being in the motions of experience sometimes means that the very thing that is taking place is lost on your eyes precisely because of its proximity to you. The burden, weariness, revelations and love carried by the protagonists in these two stories felt familiar to me. Having experienced the world outside of my neighborhood and family inspired an awakening of sorts that stirred a deeper love and admiration for the persons around me.
I love my community and I wanted to do justice to show just what made it so special to me. I was inspired by the coming architects of our tomorrow, (specifically my niece who was around 1 at the time and my nephew who was just a fetus), that will inherit and take charge of the world that I must one day forfeit. It was important to me to pass down my own legacy within the greater legacy of this community. I wanted to explore the nuances of ‘home’ and in a lot of ways this is my letting go of what I think ‘home’ should look like. The neighborhood is in the hands of a different young now; that narrative of its character no longer belongs to me, it belongs to the coming generation of architects that must rise to the task of defining and defending it.
Were there any poems that were particularly difficult to write? If so, why?
Most of the poems were difficult to write. The time they were written, in 2018, was turbulent for me. There was a death in my community, one that I managed to blame myself for and I was battling a number of things personally. Among these battles were crippling panic attacks. I would become completely incapacitated for any number of hours and then once I was functional again, I would hit the page. During this time, I thought a lot about mortality and I wondered about the things that really mattered in life. I found myself in this picture of the universe, small and mighty and I was thus able to blend easier into the flow of things on a larger scale. I realized how my life meant more when spent in communion with the Most High and in service of those around me. Being a vessel for Christ in this way meant that I had to be pure, so the task was to confront the world in me in writing and to speak truth to power as an honest and accurate witness to all that occurred within my realm. This made it difficult to write because I would have to face those lives and those faces who were written into the lines of each of the pieces. I had to live the baring of soul that made me feel naked – in the eyes of the Lord and the eyes of the people on whom I depended on and whom depended upon me. I felt so exposed. The lesson was this: there really is no hiding place in all of Creation.
How did you go about organizing the poems in the book? Was there a specific flow or structure you were aiming for?
I wanted the poems to speak to one another, so I arranged them in a way that they kind of flow into each other. Here’s a fun fact: you know how most movies have a love scene or a romantic storyline? I wanted to integrate that into the pulse and beat of the collection so I wrote “And When On Days” to give the collection that added bit of romance. The collection creates a certain type of world, like a mini neighborhood, and I wanted every representation and expression of love present in it.
Have you received any feedback from readers that surprised or moved you?
I think that when the Most High puts it in the hearts of man to be moved by these words from my soul, then there will be more readers. As of now, any feedback is welcomed and the invitation is extended to chance upon these waters in time.
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Lalibela holds within its reams the fatigue and redemption of a working class family of the African Diaspora in the West. The lively avenues, bus routes, love lives and cultures preserved in memory and in real-time as if frozen in place from another, happier time. Retaining a legacy of teaching its young hard truths about survival, identity, achievement, failure, faith, death, resilience, life, love and hate.
As concepts evolve, facts change and truth disrobes, Lalibela is an expression and legacy of survival. Within this small community with limited resources people ponder existentially, pray colossal prayers, and resuscitate grit mouth-to-mouth. Named after a town in Ethiopia that is home to the legendary rock hewn churches, Lalibela is the sanctuary for a piece of mind and a direction to that inner place of belonging that travels with us all as we navigate our various and difficult realities. Simply, Lalibela is home.
Lalibela
Lalibela is a book of poems that wander through memory, love, pain, Blackness, faith, and survival. The pieces move like snapshots. One moment you are in a kitchen full of noise and life, then suddenly you are in protest lines, then in the quiet of a bedroom at dawn. The writing drifts between tenderness and ache. It lifts up children, calls out to lovers, mourns wounds, and still finds space for hope. The book feels like a long conversation with a friend who has lived deeply.
The voice here is raw in a way that feels familiar. The plain language makes the emotion hit harder. I could hear the author’s breath in the short lines and the pauses. Some poems read like whispered confessions. Others feel like a shout in the street. I found myself thinking of certain imagery long after I turned the page. The children who glow under the sun. The exhausted women who work three jobs. The hearts that learn to love with both hands. The neighborhoods full of cracked paint and stubborn joy. These moments made me sit back for a second and just feel.
I also loved the way the author writes about Black life. There is pride and rage and humor and longing. The poems praise Black boys and girls with a kind of awe. They honor Black mothers with reverence. They admit to fear and sorrow. They insist on dreaming even when the world tries to shut the dreams away. I felt a kind of warmth in those pages. I felt seen. The writing leans into common objects and everyday scenes.
I would recommend Lalibela to readers who want poetry that talks straight and loves hard. People who care about community, identity, and the quiet bravery of getting through each day will find something here. It is a book for anyone who wants to feel close to another human being for a little while.
Pages: 70 | ASIN : B0FG147WCC
