Broken Open

Broken Open, Martha Gies’ collection of essays, might invite one to think of an unfurling iris, like the textured petals on the book’s cover, or the iris as an aperture of the eye, revealing a glint of introspection. Turn the first few pages, and you’ll glimpse sweet memories of candy in cut-glass dishes in a grandmother’s big house in town and learn of a four-year-old girl being taught arithmetic and chess by her lawyer father, occasionally summoned from bed “to find his chessboard… and his friends, elegant, amused, skeptical, waiting for an exhibition” of the sleepy child’s skill. (4) We soon understand why this girl feels school is more confining than home.

Gies cites her mother’s having been “the youngest girl graduate in the history of Oregon State [University], taking her bachelor’s degree at age nineteen,” then claims her mom’s “wit and spunk were wasted on the role of housewife.” (11) Thus Gies breaks “feminine” expectations throughout her life. As a teenager, she spent long days on her father’s farm, befriending the families from Texas who worked the land and lived in camps. She learned their language while “operating the little grocery store…selling a few staples—like milk, masa, and eggs—in order to save families extra trips to town.” (45) When her father discovered her allowing some workers credit, his reaction was “not the astonishment of admiration.”

Occasionally her father’s legal prowess and social influence proved helpful to his braceros. This respect (learned following her father’s untimely death) led to a life of activism on behalf of those in many Spanish-speaking countries, as well as social justice values Gies infused into journalism, fiction writing, college teaching, and her Traveler’s Mind annual writing workshops, which she directed and taught for twenty years.

While Gies’s memoir focuses on three key periods—childhood, finding right livelihood, and the mature reflections of age—the family stories often overlap to compress “isolated moments of great clarity” (8) with steadying grace into lyrical and literary prose. There is also a wry throughline of humor.

Perhaps handled most honestly in her layered essays is Gies’s spiritual journey, whether telling it alongside the lives of siblings or through confidences Gies cautiously discloses, from a founder of the local Black Panthers Party whose son is in jail to a counselor in a homeless shelter, to a brilliant, tormented mastermind of the bombs that brought the second World War to its abrupt end, to a beloved author and mentor, dead too soon. But the heart of wisdom in this memoir pulses from the loss of her father, and the farm soon after due to a provision that “no widow would inherit” the land. This loss influenced many of Gies’s life choices. (46)

Gies grounds history personally, accompanying a friend’s grandparents back to Mexico and using their story to trace immigration policy from the 1942 Bracero Program through its 1964 repeal, subsequent decades of haphazard INS enforcement, and the general amnesty that followed. She then shows how NAFTA, currency collapse, and shifting economies drove the desperation of those “willing to do the dishwashing, fieldwork, and hard labor” many North Americans refuse. (159) These neighbors, she reminds us, traveled through territories their families inhabited freely for generations before borders were mapped across California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico and declared parts of the United States.

During Gies’s peripatetic years, she called herself agnostic, and candidly describes her encounters and interactions with many along that spectrum of enlightenment, explaining, “There are few greater treasures to pursue than an understanding of the human heart.” (144) 

Broken Open offers life as a sacrament and profiles people who make sacrifices for each other. Martha Gies combines an affinity for a good narrative with a close study of humans in all their brokenness and illumination, each of her essays breaking through darkness into light.