Last week in ASTU we went to the Museum of Anthropology to learn about local Musqueam culture, practices and histories through the exhibition called c̓əsnaʔəm, The City Before the City. This exhibit seemed to differ from most museum exhibits I have attended because rather than artifacts and a description of their significance written by a curator, c̓əsnaʔəm consisted almost entirely of stories, both written and oral presented through videos. What interested me most about this exhibit was the way these stories were all communicated through first person singular accounts of Musqueam people.
The curator explained to the class that this way of presenting history and culture was intentional as it, unlike many other exhibitions, does not appropriate, create biased narratives, or put words into anyone’s mouths. Each individual told their own personal stories, without the use of “we” or “they.” This way we could read all primary accounts and the extract for ourselves what the overarching narratives and culture is, rather than someone doing that for us.
This brings up the question which we have pondered a lot in ASTU: who has the authority to tell these narratives of history, culture and trauma. Can all other uses of third person perspectives (“they”), or even first person plural (“we”), regardless of the intention of the curator or researcher, become biased, over simplistic or too overarching, as if trying to obtain the “real truth” that Sacco mentions in Safe Area Gorazde.
We have addressed this question in most of the literature we have studied so far in ASTU, including Safe Area Gorazde. We saw in Kogawa’s Obasan, that Kogawa’s avoided this issue of creating a unilateral portrayal of trauma by using multiple narratives and as we saw in her fond that she based her novel almost entirely on primary accounts. We also noticed in Persepolis by Satrapi that along with her work being a primary, first person singular account, she does not attempt to speak for anyone other than herself. Most recently, we have been applying this question to Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This novel, however, does not answer this question as clearly. Though Foer uses a heteroglossia of voices to represent multiple traumas, such as the Dresden Bombings and Hiroshima attacks, as well as 9/11, it has been speculated whether or not he is appropriating some of these traumas that he is less familiar with in order to create a more powerful account of the trauma of 9/11. It is in the act of speaking for others that his work becomes controversial.
This feature of first person perspectives of Musqueam people is one of this exhibit’s greatest features. In the context of a museum, I believe this method of communicating narratives is strongest as it creates not only a more fair portrayal of culture, but a more effective one as well.
However, when it comes to literature, the question still hangs in my mind, who has the authority to tell these narratives of history, culture and trauma? Are third person narratives always a risk?
