I'm addicted to fiction. I love stories. Any story, told any way. Tell them forward, tell them backwards, tell them inside out, tell them all braided up, I'm happy. When I was in graduate school, I hung out with philosophy majors and critical theorists (an ecologist needs distraction after all), so I started to hear a lot about narrative. At first I thought it was just a academically tarted up way of saying story. But narratives are sequences and stories aren't necessarily. Narratives inflict order and again, stories might or they might not. But the main thing I remember from hanging out, drinking beer and chatting is that narratives make sense of things.Which is why they're so powerful. Which is why people depend on narratives to do a lot of work. Which also explains why people get upset when a narrative they're comfortable with is challenged or threatened. That's why people got so upset when a blogger suggests that maybe our Thanksgiving practices should include a moment of remembering how much the establishment of the USA, with all our wealth, cost the people who were living here when we got here.I've been really mulling over the the story of civil rights for African Americans, because there's been a struggle about this on the blogosphere and even out away from computers. It came up in on this thread on my favorite blog a couple of days ago. There's a triumphant narrative to this piece of American history. Africans brought here in chains, the horrors of the slave trade and slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction and the backlash of Jim Crow, lynching and the anti-lynching work, then come the 50s and 60s and there seems to be a happy ending. Discrimination is illegal (though far from gone) in the USA.There are other important struggles for rights in US history, the fight for unions, for women's suffrage, for farm workers rights, against nativist anti-immigrant laws and violence. But none of them seem to have captured the popular imagination the way that the fight for African American civil rights has done.Maybe it's just timing. With the climatic acts and events coming early in the television age, many people could see the dogs set on peaceful demonstrators, see black kids spat at as they tried to go to school, see the huge march on DC. And then there are the speeches, the incredible speeches that King gave, that give me chills when I hear them now, not simply because I know this man is going to die, but because he's such an electrifying speaker.But I think it's because the narrative says that ancient wrongs were righted, that justice did triumph and that right was done. The narrative suggests that since it happened once it can happen again. That things that are wrong now can be fixed, that rights that are denied now can be had sometime, some time soon. And because it's a narrative now and not the complicated stories that happened and are still happening, it looks as though it's all done, all over. It's not.
But, it makes perfect sense to me that when some LGBT people talk about our rights, they invoke the African American civil rights movement as a model. It's a perfect shorthand and it gives hope.But when this happens something in me tightens up. As an African American who was a kid in the 50s, who knew that the story that was happening on tv was about me and about people like me, who was the same age as the four girls who died in that blown-up church, I feel like that story is mine.
But it can't belong to me, because once it's become narrative, it's off to do whatever work people can make it do. It's not a story any more and it really can't be mine. But doesn't stop me from feeling that I belong to it, that it owns me in a way that other people can never understand and it's that knowledge which gives me an unease about its casual and careless use that I just can't get myself over.Another thing that that nags at me is how the narrative's been invoked about LGBT rights. I really started to hear it a lot after Prop 8 lost in California this November. This makes a sort of sense, because marriage is a right that strikes into people's hearts. It certainly struck into mine.
Still last year, when there was that struggle about a trans-inclusive ENDA, no one was writing much about the analogy with African American rights, how come? Employment protection, the right to apply for and keep jobs was an important part of the earlier struggle. But the discussion about getting the legislation pitted people who wanted the law to be inclusive even if there were little chance of the law passing (not that there was that much chance of the law passing anyway) against people who wanted a law they thought the powers that be would go for (as if). It's this selective thing. When it came to marriage, then the narrative's invoked, But when it came to the equally basic right to work that one person might have and others don't, not a whisper. People have been surprised that many POC didn't vote for marriage rights. People should have been shocked at the number of LG people who weren't willing to fight for trans rights. Understanding that all our rights are connected and that we need to fight for every right for every person isn't something that comes automatically with your skin color or your gender or your class or any other part of your identities (or their intersections). It comes when you do the hard mental and emotional work to be a progressive. And that's more than any story alone can do.
8 comments:
Love this essay, rrp. You say so much here, and I've spent a lot of time thinking along similar lines since story, writing, narrative and social justice are at the center for me.
Your view of how and why people enlist the civil rights movement as narrative is generous, and it makes sense, and as partial or conscious motive, I think you're certainly right about it. Another way, of course, to talk about it is that it represents co-option which evades actual responsibility, and makes a fundamentally dishonest triumphalist narrative which erases the real story.
It's interesting to me how panicked and neurotic people get if someone makes that latter suggestion, though. The reaction is: 'don't take my STORY, man' - even though it's not their story, it's their co-opted narrative. And there's this huge fear - usually expressed in something about how they are not allowed to talk about anything anymore (cue violins) with a complete failure to understand how that is not at all the issue - that the issue is that they are not talking about the civil rights movement or whatever other story-made-narrative, they are talking about themselves.
But it can't belong to me, because once it's become narrative, it's off to do whatever work people can make it do. It's not a story any more and it really can't be mine. But doesn't stop me from feeling that I belong to it, that it owns me in a way that other people can never understand and it's that knowledge which gives me an unease about its casual and careless use that I just can't get myself over.
Yeah. And you know, being a writer whose whole artistic life is centered on story and narrative, and also being just the kind of mind/spirit who responds to story and narrative like nothing else, in general principle the idea of story going off to do whatever work people can make it do is one I value as much as anything. But in the specifics of how story is made to carry meaning, and how real people's stories are made into a grocery-shelf from which others feel they can take the bits they like and leave the rest, some real problems emerge.
In my undergraduate study I had the opportunity to work with a man named James Young whose research and writing centers on the ethics of representation of the Holocaust.
The work with him forced me to fully wrap my head around the dehumanization inherent in making a metaphor out of an actual event.
Also the deep disrespect paid to the people who actually survive horror (or don't) by making an emotionally manipulative and convenient marketing meme out of their story - whether what's being marketed is a museum, a movie, a 'shock and awe' response to a ceiling-high pile of shoes rather than real understanding of the consequences of hate and/or the individual reality of each single life, etc..
And again, I'm a writer. Metaphor is not only my bread but my heart. I don't want to live in a world without metaphor - I believe in it. And. Not all things in the world are mine, and I don't need to lie, cheat, or steal to make metaphor. Co-opting the civil rights story into a triumphalist narrative is a lie, it cheats actual people of their stories, and it steals both experience and meaning to enlist it in the service of something else, often with mercenary zeal utterly disrespecting fact. There are analogies between basic human experiences, but they are not the same and people must be allowed to speak for their own stories rather than being co-opted into someone else's.
I know that all artists tread perilously close to this line in making metaphor all the time, even aware of it. Metaphor and narrative are risky business. Analogy is even worse.
But hopefully my baseline awareness is always that stories are real. They are the real, lived, personal material from which real people's lives are made. That's not mine, unless it's mine.
There are so many additional examples of this triumphalist narration of real story in media, too – from Schindler's List-style fantasy about 'the good people' replacing something difficult and uncomfortable like Claude Lanzmann's Sho'ah to soft-focus and eroticized rape 'victims' rescued by the male eye to a million others.
When I look at these narratives, mainly what I see is people seeking to evade uncomfortable responsibility for action (whether in the past, the present, or both).
Which leads to your right-on final paragraph:
Understanding that all our rights are connected and that we need to fight for every right for every person isn't something that comes automatically with your skin color or your gender or your class or any other part of your identities (or their intersections). It comes when you do the hard mental and emotional work to be a progressive. And that's more than any story alone can do.
Seriously.
Thanks so much for this post & the focus it brought this morning. Damn I love your writing.
Thanks Theriomorph. You really cleared the fog away from a couple of things I wasn't seeing quite too. First that "don't take my STORY man" reaction that people give when you say, "Hey, you can't use that." is born of fear. I'm not sure I understand what that fear is about really. What is the hole in their world that narrative papers over?
The second thing is the intensely problematic use of other people's stories. The Holocaust one really makes me wince because when I was about twelve or thirteen I read "The Diary of Anne Frank" because girls did then and I fantasized about hiding in that space. It was romantic, you know. And I can sort of let myself off the hook because I was a girl, but that sort of projection is so seductive.
But I am wondering whether any use is ok. Last week I was digitizing some old records (long-term, nearly endless project) and I found a copy of the Wild Tchoupitoulas. There's been this tradition of African Americans wearing these elaborate costumes, based on ideas of Native American formal wear (except like in pastels and covered with glitter) marching in Mardi Gras parades. The Neville brothers are connected to them in some way or other.
I am completely of two minds about this. On one hand it is appropriation, no way around it. On the other, it's its own incredible fantasy. So how does one think about the imagination moving out into someone else's tradition, culture, whatever to make something new? I don't know.
Thank you, the comment took me into another thornier place.
Thank you, the comment took me into another thornier place.
I live to serve. ; )
Hope you don't mind the long-form comments/convo, because yours just did for me, too, especially with the kids + stories thing.
One of the truly valuable things story can do is bring attention to/celebration of real heroism in cultures and lives not someone's own, you know? And I think sometimes people co-opt with this as their motive - their effort is to celebrate something or someone, not to one-dimensionalize or erase the rest. But it's still problematic, because when it's that grocery-store thing of just taking the nice or easy bits and leaving the rest, it sets up the 'right' to turn other people's stories into triumphalist narrative in a weird way, even with little kids. It can become one of those god-awful Thanksgiving plays at elementary schools very quickly, even when it's adults who are doing it.
I don't know about that part, it is thorny.
What I do think is that the problem lies in the romanticizing, regardless of motive.
Anne Frank is a great/illustrative example; Holocaust/Sho'ah scholars often (at best) grit their teeth when people say: 'oh, you study the Holocaust? I read Anne Frank's diary...' because she *is* the icon of the Holocaust, and the question in mind for the person considering the ethics of representation or social justice is: why? Why Anne Frank? Why is the icon a child who is passive unto death, helpless, uninformed, a tragedy locked in the attic?
Anne Frank *was* a tragedy, and we have her particular story because we have her diary, and it does illustrate one kind of experience, and I don't (and have never heard anyone) wish to diminish that. But/and: the argument for her hagiography goes like this - she humanizes the Jews. She's worried about her crush, her boredom, the daily dynamics of family; she was an innocent who was killed.
Which is all true to one degree or another, but so is this:
All Jews were not passive. All Jews were not children. All Jews were not innocents. All Jews were not wholly unaware of what was going on. A whole lot of Jews were fighting.
Why, then, the Jew or the Sho'ah scholar or the media critic often asks, is hers the iconic story, rather than any number of other people's - people who were much more active heroes? Are they *not* human? Do we not have a responsibility to humanize them? And why is the Jew we can make into a comfortable martyr-icon the one who was a passive, helpless child?
Point being, her story *does* tap into the romantic minds of children (and adults) who read about her, and if that were fully contextualized it would be fine. But instead her hagiography comes at the expense of others, and many people encounter the Holocaust *only* through her. This reflects a deeper problem - one which the kids who read her diary then absorb. They have just consumed a co-opted narrative, a two-dimensionalized stereotype. One not as actively malicious as many others, but damaging just the same.
So the question becomes: why do we romanticize the people and things we do? And: is it ever possible to romanticize and remain truthful? I think it's not. I think Adrienne Rich's great phrase about truth being an increasing complexity is the thing (and that isn't ever gonna supply the sound-byte, the short book, the quick visit to another story or experience then a return to one's own having taken the easy bits - because there aren't any easy bits).
So what I'm thinking right now about your Mardi Gras example or the many others like it is that celebration of other stories must be encouraged, supported, legitimized and expected - with some conscious effort against co-option into triumphalist or two-dimensional narrative. Which means, it has to be long-form, long-term; a deeper and broader learning than we generally do.
Not a romanticizing of parts, but an engagement *with* the whole.
With that 'with' word being essential.
Anyway, those are a few more thoughts. : )
Oh, and this: What is the hole in their world that narrative papers over?
This is a damn good question.
I think there are a lot of easy answers people could (and do) project out of hurt and anger, but one thing I'm wondering right now is if this shouldn't be the guiding question for any social justice work aimed at bridging - to ask, not to answer for others - because it puts the heart of the matter at the heart.
Even just to ask myself that question about an individual Mormon with whom I speak about Prop 8 makes me humanize that adversary - and from there I might be able to figure out a more useful approach and effect some real change.
Hmm.
This has to be short, because I have to run out the door. But I wanted to tell you that I've got a more substantial reply on the way.
Thank you, thank you again.
S'okay, you - I never expect an answer to these long ramble trains of thought (though I'm always glad to hear some), and only belatedly realized this was up on S'ville with tons of comments, too. : )
Greetings to the feline mafia.
Also - very belatedly grasping the context prompting this post (was behind in reading).
Wow, there was a lot in that thread. I'm so glad you were able to articulate this post in response (even if I didn't have a clue when I initially read it). It's valuable as could be regardless of prompts, but particularly cool (in every sense of that word) given the intensity of the painful conflicts illustrated in the discussion over there.
Which they sure were oh boy.
Hope you don't mind the long-form comments/convo, because yours just did for me, too, especially with the kids + stories thing.
I really prefer the long response because it's a sign of thinking going on, rather than reacting and typing.
So what I'm thinking right now about your Mardi Gras example or the many others like it is that celebration of other stories must be encouraged, supported, legitimized and expected - with some conscious effort against co-option into triumphalist or two-dimensional narrative. Which means, it has to be long-form, long-term; a deeper and broader learning than we generally do.
Not a romanticizing of parts, but an engagement *with* the whole.
With that 'with' word being essential.
This whole mess has gotten me thinking about something that should probably be a post on its own - Who owns what when we're talking about things like histories, narratives, cultural production? Things, material or not, that are just out there where everyone can see them, consume them, and then turn them to their own purposes.
One of the truly valuable things story can do is bring attention to/celebration of real heroism in cultures and lives not someone's own, you know? And I think sometimes people co-opt with this as their motive - their effort is to celebrate something or someone, not to one-dimensionalize or erase the rest. But it's still problematic, because when it's that grocery-store thing of just taking the nice or easy bits and leaving the rest, it sets up the 'right' to turn other people's stories into triumphalist narrative in a weird way, even with little kids. It can become one of those god-awful Thanksgiving plays at elementary schools very quickly, even when it's adults who are doing it.
I suspect what happens in these celebrations is that there's little deep understanding of what's being celebrated. The heroism is a flat, received thing, it's not being relieved through the re-enactment. One thing that really resonated with me in your comment is this idea of engagement, that people have to engage with the whole, insofar as it's available, of the thing they're using.
I want to return to the Holocaust example again because it's something that I'm completely outside of and that I have been a consumer of, for better or worse.Leon Uris wrote a mainstream book about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Mila 18 that I must have read and re-read a dozen times. It gave me the images of fighting, compromising, imperfect Jews, that, while still incredibly romanticized - I don't delude myself about that for a minute - still "thickened" the mental idea I had of what life was like for Jews during the nightmare of Nazism. But I would never think it would be ok for me to participate in a re-enactment of the battles of the Warsaw Ghetto or think that because I admired and respected that awful struggle, it gave me license to use it to make an argument about some other struggle I was part of.
It wouldn't be right.
I think this is because it's so close in time and that there's still so much contested. (I was going to write unresolved, but what would resolution look like? I have no idea.) I'm not sure what it means in terms of ownership of the history itself . And this is the big thing that I'm having a really hard time thinking about. As you might have seen in the mess on Shakes that got me going on this, there is this idea that African Americans somehow own the civil rights story. While I have an emotional understanding of that, I don't believe that we can rope areas off as belonging to some and not to others. On what grounds is that legitimate?
Years ago when I was a professor, I went to a conversation between one of the members of the art faculty and a guest. They're both women of color. They were talking about public art, I think. At one point, the guest said something about going into one of the big public museums in NYC and feeling excluded. And I had this rush of anger. I felt that the stuff in the museum belongs to me as much as it does to anyone else. It is as much mine to be moved by, stimulated by, to use as a source of inspiration, as a launching pad for my own art as anyone's. And I'll be damned if I'm going to hand that wealth over.
If I can "own" the treasury of centuries, then why can't someone "own" the civil rights story? I think it has something to do with that engagement rather than re-enactment issue. But this is getting to be a long comment even for someone as verbose as I am and really needs its own post.
Thanks again.
If I can "own" the treasury of centuries, then why can't someone "own" the civil rights story? I think it has something to do with that engagement rather than re-enactment issue.
Yes, that's usually what I come to as well - that the engagement with the whole (or at least an attempt towards that) is essential if the goal is cultural sharing, connection, coalition across difference. That the only way use of someone else's history and tradition is not co-option is when it's an engagement with a whole, complex, *living* tradition. I think this is true even in the cases where most of the people whose stories are in use are dead, because their survivors carry a deeply personal legacy from the dead which extends directly into their present experience.
I really like the way you articulated the trouble with the impulse toward even the well-intentioned lionizing stuff:
I suspect what happens in these celebrations is that there's little deep understanding of what's being celebrated. The heroism is a flat, received thing, ...
- and I come back to the idea of responsibility and evasion of it, too. We can evade responsibility for the *ongoing* struggle by grabbing a hero, pulling her or him out of context, and waving her/him around at the parade - like: Native American genocide? Problem solved, we love Geronimo! He's our team mascot!
Logically followed, of course, by:
Sexism? Glass ceilings? Nancy Pelosi! Hillary Clinton! Homophobia? Ellen! Rachel Maddow! TV is full of you people! We've given you airtime, we have made you an icon and love being fans of your culture (we love hip hop! Woody Allen rulz!) – what are you bitching about? Racism? We elected a black President! It's all good now!
As I'm saying that, I'm thinking that Obama's name is almost certainly going to be turned into a verb describing this delusional argument, isn't it (if it hasn't already - I could well have missed it). Obamized? Obamafied?
And of course it's more nuanced than those examples sometimes, but those more nuanced instances are all the more poisonous for being harder to see.
Anyway. It's a huge conversation - hell, life's work - to unpack this, I think.
But one more thing: I'm with you on the art question. I'm not quite sure how to articulate this, but it seems like a lot of us have a hard time honoring our traditions and outrage and desire to educate others about not co-opting without - whether we mean to or not - indulging in at least some separatism/ghettoizing. (And then that sometimes plays out further within the identity group - you're not X enough, you have X privilege the rest of us don't by virtue of X, therefore you're not *really* one of us, etc..)
I think when we get into 'you can't look at this and get anything from it because you're not like me it's mine' or 'everything you do or make or say is irrelevant to me because you are not like me' we are failing utterly. We're - what - hoarding and hiding out of scarcity-fear, basically. I understand the impulse, but I don't think it actually serves anyone but the oppressor in the situation.
Seems like whenever any coalition makes an attempt to talk about this, too, it becomes a conversation about the necessity for 'safe space' (which I don't believe there ever is, in any group, but that's a different issue) as a justification for further division. Then the oppressors go about their business while the potential coalition members who could effectively challenge them fight amongst themselves.
The feelings run so deep, though, and group dynamics are so powerful even as they are wholly predictable, I haven't yet figured out anything like an effective way to navigate this, except by long form work, one on one relationship building, maybe very small groups with very clear goals.
Like I said, I understand the impulse to pull back, to claim and possess and protect an importuned and abused history. I just don't think it finally serves either justice or change.
I don't know.
Will look forward to your next post about all this.
Lastly: Leon Uris! Ha. I confess, as much as "Exodus" is like, the bodice-ripper of Jewish history, I loved loved loved it as an adolescent.
Not too many years ago I watched the Paul Newman movie of that book and was both amused by how that was still true, and how it still stirred (I think there's a legitimate hunger for strong and nuanced Jewish heroes, as you noted, and Uris gave some - plus, they were all so tough and sexy) - and saddened by how complex and extremely painful the whole notion of Zionism has become as a result of what Israel's politics have become. It was kind of unrelentingly stomach-achy to watch, actually.
But I remember clearly the relief I felt encountering Jewish caricatures who at least erred on the side of megababe superhero fierce fighter idealists instead of the ubiquitous corpse-in-pile-o'-corpses (or slumlord check-casher/whatever other recycling of medieval stereotypes).
So yeah, secret love of Leon Uris. : )
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