A Woman Is Dreaming

By Tashmyra Crowe

This is a story of women; a cosmos of women`s experience and connections across time and culture- their worlds, their histories, their conflicts and perils. It is also a story of love, death and grieving: and of courage, resilience and healing. The book is divided into 7 stories that intersect through dreams, images and timeless themes. The book as a whole tells a story, yet each individual story also tells a story. As the stories move through time and space and as the women move through their individual lives, there exists an otherworldly dream sequence that is only sometimes conscious. This is a book about dreams and passions, and about prophesies and destinies.

Xing Hua, a young Chinese woman, bereaved by the loss of her baby daughter, departs on a magical journey across Sichuan province in China, with an elderly peasant woman on an unlikely quest to find the mystical Emerald City. Through their unusual friendship, the young woman rediscovers her joy and the old woman learns to make peace with her life.

Susan, a woman from Montreal, is bringing her mother`s ashes back to Ireland. Along the way she is forced to confront aspects of her self and her lineage that go beyond her own life story, and that ultimately touch the edges of unknown worlds.

Tajmira, a young woman who is part of a now-vanished nomadic tribe on the Negev desert in the 11th century, sets out on a journey that goes beyond time and space, in an epoch where time and space were not as rigid as they are today.

Mariane, a young mother caught up in the hysteria of the witch hunt of 17th century Europe, is sentenced to death. Her story attests to the enduring beauty of spirit that has the ability to rise above both life and death, even as death is always the unavoidable and irrevocable end to every life.

Golda, the wife of a Rabbi who is travelling out her village in Russia after a pogrom in the mid 19th century, leaves her husband dead and her daughters scattered. Her journey leads her to a solitary life at the edge of the world, and through the deep love for her children and the grandchildren that she will never meet, is forced to confront her own life decisions and to make peace with God.

Natasha, a young Russian Jewish woman who had been living in Paris during the Nazi occupation, is brought to the edge of death. Her journey later brings her to America where she lives two lives with the ever present and interchangeable realities of her passion and her pain.

Sparrow is a 6 yr old girl whose world is filled with the magic and joy of simply being alive, even as she is surrounded by grief at every turn. She has the ability, through the teaching of her grandmother, to turn life into stories, and through her imagination is able to create a most beautiful world.

These 7 stories unravel and weave together in mysterious ways; situated in the realities of their own time and space. But they are also stories that attest to the unbridled power that has the ability to break through the thin layer of everyday reality in order to reach out and touch infinity.

I would like to thank all those who have told me their stories, and their ancestor's stories, and allowed me to write them. All those who have given me insight into my stories, and helped me to travel and research. All those whose experiences I have portrayed, and who have helped me to portray them well. I do so humbly, and with immense gratitude and understanding of my cultural limitations and blindsights. Thank you. Tashmyra Crowe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tashmyra Crowe
• Release date: Oct 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370203901

Tashmyra Crowe

Born in Montreal of immigrant parents in the 1960s, Tashmyra Crowe became a traveller at an early age. With a deep personal history of Irish sensibility and the rich artistic traditions and visual poetry of Montreal, she travelled and lived in Europe, Latin America and Asia, as well as various places in Canada. She has focused her life primarily on the joys of being a writer, a teacher, and a mother.A Woman Is Dreaming is her first published novel and is dedicated to all the women in her family. Her grandmothers, the Crowes, the Rowleys and the Gateleys; her mother, Julia Crowe; her sisters; Anne Marie and Trixie; her nieces, Marissa, Genvieve and Kristen; and her daughter Serafina. This book is also dedicated to her grandfather, Sam Fraser, who taught her how to turn life into stories and to never be afraid.

Book preview

1

A Woman is Dreaming

A woman is dreaming that she is a crow, flying high among the clouds. She knows that she is dreaming. She tilts slightly to the right, twists in a semi-circle, changes direction.

Now the sky is turquoise and the clouds have disappeared. And below her, for as far as she can see, is an endless expanse of desert.

She is aware of her feet for the first time as she plunges downwards, headfirst, pulled against her will. They grab intuitively at the air like hands.

Now she is standing on a hard crust of solidified sand. She can hear the dull scrape of claws beneath her as she hops and wobbles forward, propelled towards the entrance of a low cave. Inside, a woman is sleeping.

Now the woman is dreaming that she is a woman asleep in a stone cave. The air around her is dark and still. She can hear the wind whistle across the surface of the sand outside. But she can also feel the hard cold closeness of stone. And the warmth of her own body as it rises and falls with each breath.

She is the crow once again. She rises up effortlessly through the air, passing through solid stone as if it were made out of clouds.

She circles the stone cave several times, rising higher and higher with each pass. Below her, the landscape swirls and eddies in dizzying circles as if the entire desert was a moving ocean of sand.

Now she is flying back, retracing her flight path. Up ahead, in the distance, is a group of women. They are the same colour and texture as the landscape. They are the stiff mounds of golden sand, hardened by wind and lack of rain; they are the speckled rust and darkly reddened rock that rises up like waves against a cloudless turquoise sky.

She tries to stop, but the momentum of the dream flight won't let her. She tries to call out to them. But her voice is the voice of the crow and as it cuts through the dream, the world splits in two; cracked open like an egg, spilling her back into her bed, wide awake, as if she has just fallen from out of the sky.

***

Last night, I dreamt I was a crow flying high above a desert. I dreamt also that I was encapsulated in stone in the middle of that same desert. It felt as if I were dead except that I could feel myself breathing.

Then I saw them; the women I have dreamed of many times - the desert women. But when I called out to them, my voice was the voice of the crow. It was so loud and so close that it frightened me. And it woke me up.

2

Fire and Water

There is a group of women gathered together on the edge of the desert. One of the women, the one they call Grandmother, looks up as she lays down the snakeskin rattle that she has been keeping time with. The other women look up also, pausing in their work, and turn to face the direction that Grandmother has indicated.

Tajmira is not yet even the smallest movement on the southwest horizon, but Grandmother watches her approach with her second sight. She watches while the other women resume their work crushing berries into paint, peeling and weaving grasses, preparing and drying roots for the ceremonial fire.

Tajmira has been winding her way steadily for hours now, following the donkey trails through the hills, disappearing and reappearing with more and more clarity. By the time she is in full view, the sun has set and the fire has been lit.

The elder women are gathered together on the periphery of the group among the encroaching shadows. They have been calling in the ancestors for hours with their drumming, holding open the gateway to the other world.

When Tajmira finally arrives, the women are gathered in a large circle around a bed of glowing coals. The drumming has stopped and there is silence. Tajmira sits in the space that they have prepared for her, takes off the gourd she has been carrying with her for the past three days and nights. She passes it to the woman on her left, who takes a sip and passes it to the woman on her left, who passes it to her left, who passes it to hers. Tajmira again takes up the gourd, last of all, after it has returned from completing the circle, and pours the last remaining drops into her own mouth.

Then the drumming starts up again, very softly, around the periphery of the circle as Grandmother begins to speak.

***

"We are always walking on the edge, the precipice between the worlds.

"The task of finding water on the desert is not a simple gesture. It is the difference between life and death. It is life. It is the ability to tap into the intuitive mind, to speak with the elements, to listen to the ancestors.

But to walk with fire is an act of surrender. In life, there are times to resist and times to surrender. And there is much wisdom in knowing the difference.

***

Now Tajmira is standing on the threshold of fire, at the entrance to a maze woven out of grasses. The grasses form a spiral leading to the center. Her hair has been tied back, her face smudged with berry paint, her skirts gathered up and tied above her knees. The grasses smoke and sizzle and the coals glow red hot between the weavings.

Tajmira removes her sandals and steps carefully into the fire. The aroma of scented grasses fills the air around her. She cannot see the coals for the smoke but finds her way with her feet, feeling her way through the ancient spiral to the heart of the fire.

Then suddenly and without warning, Grandmother springs up, swift as a snake uncurling from beneath a rock, and pours a vessel of water over her. Smoke rises thickly into the air. The women leap up and lift the young woman out. She is as black as the shadow crow that rises up also at that moment from out of the billowing smoke and disappears into the darkness.

***

Grandmother sits quietly now as feasting and dancing continues long into the night, following the flight of the crow with her other mind, deep into the world of no shadow.

Later on, she takes the young woman's feet into her hands. She reads them like reading tealeaves or like tasting the weather. Grandmother reads them in total darkness, running her old bony hands over the soft pink soles.

***

When first light appears the next morning, the women are fast asleep under their goatskin tent, laying on colourful layers of pillows and covered in woolen blankets.

Soon, they will pack up the donkeys and head back, and again there will be another feast and more dancing as Tajmira is welcomed back into the whole community as a newly initiated woman.

3

My Mother's Ashes

My story begins with my maternal grandmother, Mary Anne Elizabeth Crowe. My mother was also a Crowe.

That dirty old bird she always called it.

The crow is a bad omen in Ireland. A bringer of bad news. A forewarner of death. Nothing good ever to be said of it.

My mother died last year. But her spirit is still here, haunting me. I thought that once I had brought her ashes back to Ireland, to the house where she was born, that her spirit would be at peace. But she still won't let me go. Every night she sits at the foot of my bed, wringing her hands as she always did, sighing in my ear.

My grandmother was what was known as a wailing banshee; a bean chaointe; a wailing woman by translation. It is an old and forgotten tradition in Ireland now. But even then, in my grandmother's time, according to historical records, this pre-Christian custom of wailing at funerals no longer existed. The Church had passed laws to ban the tradition hundreds of years previous, in the 17th century.

The Banshee herself is a mythological figure, a spirit woman who would appear just prior to a death, to warn family members. According to some accounts, she was an old hag who wailed and wept and wrung her hands, her face covered in a black veil, and by others she was a beautiful young woman with long golden hair. But by all accounts, the wail of the banshee was a mournful sound that could be heard