never be daunted in public

Blogging with a delicious cheese sandwich (No name cheese on Winnipeg light rye bread)

Reading Blog Soundtrack: “This is a Fire Door Never Leave Open” and “Left and Leaving” by The Weakerthans

I had never blogged before this term.  I practically broke into a cold sweat at the idea of our individual blogs and class blogging.  I love to write.  I sometimes feel that “drive to inscribe” that we’ve talked about in class.  However, the thought of my blog being read by you, my fellow classmates, was frankly… terrifying.  My academic writing and growth has always been something that I thought of private.  Obviously profs have to read your work.  You have to get a grade somehow.  But, people reading my work… and having the blog just posted up there… somewhat out of my control… that’s something else entirely.  So I decided to quote Hemingway and titled this blog site, “Never be daunted in public”, in hopes that I could adopt a new courage in combining the private and the public in some sort of “scholarly way.”

It’s interesting how in this course we’ve often looked at the private vs. the public and how life narratives bring very personal, private matters into the public sphere.  Sarah Polley’s film Stories We Tell is a great example of how these spheres are not so separate after all.  They overlap and inform each other.  In some moments in the film they seem to bash into each other and shatter those separate lines completely.  Her film is a family story, full of insider knowledge and intimacy that draws us as outsiders/viewers into her work.  As she constructs the narrative of how she found out that Michael Polley was not her biological father and that she was the child of an affair, she examines internal and conflicting family (and friend) stories.  More than give answers for how memories, stories, and identities operate in our lives, the film causes certainty to collapse under the weight of its construction and self-reflection.  It beautifully raises question upon question through its use of the genres of documentary film and life narrative.

Because of the ways that Polley employs images through filmed interviews, family films, photography, and staged scenes it is also helpful to look at the genre of documentary film.  I’ve been taking a documentary and history course at the same time as this course.  In our discussions in that class, we have often talked about the ways in which images are seen as documents and consequently taken as truth.  Yet, as Polley reveals when she pulls the lens back, images are constructions and informed by an author, who mediates the image.  This is particularly apparent when she reveals, near the conclusion of the film, that some of the grainy, Super 8 films we have viewed were not actually amateur, family films, but staged representations that she has constructed.  In this moment Polley complicates questions of authority, representation, and authenticity.  All of these matters become just as grainy as the film.  There are no crisp clean lines.   Consequently, the interviews and images that were shot in the contemporary format are also reframed by the revelation of Polley’s directorial slight of hand.  These interviews are scheduled and staged, framed and edited.  We are not encountering Polley’s family directly as people; we are encountering filmic representation of these individuals.

The film also blurs lines of documentary modes.  Bill Nichols describes the multiple forms in his book Introduction to Documentary.  Polley’s utiltizes multiple forms.  It is expository (Direct voiceover is given).  It is participatory (Polley interacts directly with the subjects and is in fact a subject herself).  It is reflexive (Polley calls attention to conventions of filmmaking within the film).  And, it is also poetic (the film emphasizes visual and auditory rhythms patterns and form).  There is a poetic use of images.  The recurring use of the image of table brings to mind family conversations and stories that are told over dinners.  There is a sense of intimacy, familiarity, and communal and personal histories represented in the image of the table.  Additionally, the poetic aspect of the film is enforced through the use of music.  The majority of the music in the film is taken from an album of silent film scores called, Play Me a Movie.  The choice to use music from silent films is another way in which Polley addresses the subject of memory.  There is a sense of nostalgia attached to silent films in general.  Furthermore, it speaks to the variety of ways stories are told and enforced.  The music of silent films was used to evoke emotion and create suspense.  It was essential to telling the narrative.  Likewise memories often evoke emotions and, like we have discussed previously in class, our memories often contribute to the stories we tell in the present.  Polley uses two contemopary indie songs in her film: “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver and “Demon Host” by Timber Timbre.  It would be interesting to view the film again and see where she chooses to place these songs.  As a music fan, I wonder how she came across these specific works.  Was she listening to them as she wrote or edited the film?  Does she associate them to particular moments in her life or to particular emotions?  What is she trying to express through the songs in the film?  There are so many ways that artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers interpret and represent life narratives.  Polley shows us again how many voices are involved in the stories we tell about our lives.

In Unsettling the Settler Within  Paulette Regan writes, “Reconnecting reason and emotion – head and heart – is integral to an unsettling pedagogy” (12).  For me, walking into the “Speaking to Memory: Images and Voices from St. Michael’s Residential School” exhibit was an unsettling experience.  It was unsettling emotionally.  It was also a reminder of the importance of including multiple narratives, particularly those that highlight the resilience and agency of Indigenous people, in order to unsettle the colonial legacy and narrative of Canada.

As a history student, I have encountered the stories of the IRS system multiple times.  However, the way that the exhibit was set up in the Museum of Anthropology forced me to confront the testimonies of survivors in a new way.  Walking through the Great Hall past the totem polls, carvings and other pieces of Indigenous visual culture raised many thoughts and emotions that reminded me of the ways in which IRS sought to destroy the culture of Indigenous groups in Canada.  The 1920 quote from Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott of the objective of the IRS “to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic” was particularly jarring in how it was presented.  For me, it was emotional because of having walked through the Great Hall.  The vastness of the physical representations of Indigenous culture was in stark contrast with the sparse IRS exhibit.  This contrast was continued by the way the quote was displayed on a canvas.  The image of the desolate interior of a room at St. Michael’s looking out onto the beauty of nature outside the window highlighted the way in which IRS isolated Indigenous children from their families, culture, and a land that was their home.  This image spoke to me about the destruction of identity for individuals and for a society.  However, I do question if the exhibit’s presence on a university campus should also raise questions in regards to privilege and accessibility.  Who is the exhibit intended for?  Will it mostly be seen by academics, university students, and children brought in on field trips?  If so, what role does this exhibit play in the process of Truth and Reconciliation?  Does it even need to play a role or is it important just that it exists?

I believe this exhibit is important in the ways that it seeks to reframe the testimonies of IRS survivors.  The way the exhibit was laid out with Beverly Brown’s images on one side of the room and the quotes from survivor’s testimonies on the other side highlighted the resilience of IRS survivors.  For me, this layout significantly worked to return humanity and agency to the children of St. Michael’s.  It explored their self-made communities.  Many of the images reminded me of photographs that I have seen of my own family, depicting every day life.  It reminded me of both individuals and communities.  The plaque at the beginning of the photo section stated, “This photo collection is not meant to extol the virtues of St. Mike’s or justify the wrongdoing that have been publically documented.  Rather, it pays tribute to the resilience, spirit and strength of these students.”  I think it succeeds in doing this and that is important work in ensuring that the testimonies of survivors are not insensitively consumed by audiences hungry for tragedy.  Additionally, as a student studying life narratives, I think it’s important to note that this exhibit reveals the ways in which images and language can work together and against each other to share life narratives in a moving way.

The exhibit raised many more questions in regards to truth and reconciliation and the importance of remembrance on a national level.  How can we “unsettle the settler,” like Regan suggests is needed?  If the opportunity to visit this exhibit is limited and privileged, where can Canadians encounter not only the tragedy and horror in the testimonies of IRS survivors, but also their resilience and strength?  Further, what role do the apologies play?  Does the framing of apologies by the Christian churches in Canada contribute to or disrupt the act of colonization?  By framing the apologies in Christian language are the churches continuing to impose their beliefs on Indigenous cultures, even if their intentions are not to do so?  In the government’s apology, the second last in the exhibition, Harper states that “there is no place in Canada for the attitudes that inspired the Indian Residential Schools system to ever prevail again.”  I find myself echoing another thought from Regan.  She questions: “What would it mean in concrete terms for the settler majority to shoulder the collective burden of the history and legacy of the residential school system” (2).  I don’t have an answer.  I see the importance of exhibits like “Speaking to Memory”, but I also believe that the audience for this exhibit and those like it must be increased if Canadians are actually to shoulder that burden.

This past fall I took the class History of Human Rights here at UBC.  As we studied the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the legacy of residential schools within Canada, the goverment rejected a UN human rights call for a review of violence against Aboriginal women (CTV News article).  I found this reaction troubling at the time and now after reading Maggie de Vries’s memoir, Missing Sarah, and Jiwani and Young’s article “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse” about the Missing Women of the Downtown Eastside (DTES), the Canadian government’s rejection appears even more irresponsible.  The government’s rejection reveals the continued need for social action such as today’s Womens Memorial March, which seeks to address the very issues of “poverty and systemic exploitation, abuse and violence” that the UN called Canada to examine.  The memorializing of the Missing Women, individually and by name, at the places that they were last seen emphasizes the important role that life narrative plays in the social action of memorializing, but also, within calls for social justice.  It is by seeing the lives of these women that we are able to see the loss of these women as well.  Further, by seeing the Missing Women each as individuals we are also able to see the ways in which they were a community that shared similar backgrounds.  Life narratives do the work of pointing for the need of social change and for the creation of a counter narrative of the DTES and perhaps also for Aboriginal women.  Many of the Missing Women were Aboriginal and the legacy of violence and systemic abuse against Aboriginals should be taken into account.  I am interested to see as we study the TRC and look at the role of telling one’s story has played within the TRC’s mandate, if as a class we will find an even greater need for the life narratives of inter-generational survivors of residential schools to be examined in regards to the Missing Women of the DTES.

In reading de Vries’s descriptions of the struggle of how to represent her sister Sarah, one of the Missing Women, and how to work through her own experience, I am reminded of Leigh Gilmore’s article “Limit-Cases Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Jurisdictions of Identity” and of my own work in Northern Ireland.  Traumatic experiences are almost impossible to represent and capture.  Gilmore writes, “The consensus position argues that trauma is beyond language in some crucial way, that language not only fails in the face of trauma, but is mocked by it and confronted with its own insufficiency. Yet even as the view that one cannot speak about or represent trauma prevails, language is asserted as that which can and must heal the survivor and the community.”  It is through the speaking of names, remembering the lost, and sharing of life narratives that communities enter into healing.  In Northern Ireland, I was able to work with poet Padraig O’Tuama in regards to Peace and Reconciliation.  He continues to work with programs and lecture in the ways that sharing stories and art can be used to restore humanity after trauma. I bring up this work because communities in Northern Ireland like communities in Canada have a legacy of trauma.  O’Tuama’s work focuses on life narratives to create change and restore humanity within individuals and within communities from the ground up.  However, his work and the Womens Memorial March reminds me that it the individual life narratives that are also what can continue to drive social movements for change, even if it ignored by the government or authorities at first.

If you are interested in hearing some of Padraig O’Tuama poetry which often includes aspects of life narrative, some poems can be seen on YouTube.  At around 22 mins he shares a poem about the sharing of family secret that was never to be told.

In class we discussed how Fred Wah’s bio-text Diamond Grill can be read as creating a counter historical narrative.  We examined how he used the historical documents from the Chinese Head Tax and infused it with references to significant historical dates, the work and lives of Chinese immigrants in Canada, and racial slurs in order to interrogate the ways in which a nation’s history is constructed and understood.  Wah reveals how history and identity are deeply entwined.  This raised the question in me of how other life narratives have challenged the dominant historical narrative and national identity of Canada.

I would argue that history and life narratives work both against each other and with each other to create identities.  Dominant historical narratives, particular in regards to nation building, can exclude particular groups or individuals from the national narrative.  However, the telling of life narratives from those on the margins can work to subvert the dominant historical narrative.   Coming from Winnipeg, the historical figure of Louis Riel and the controversy that has surrounded his role and the role of the Métis people in the formation of Canada exemplifies the ways in which a life narrative, told in a variety of forms and by a variety of authors, can move a marginalized figure, culture, and counter history towards the centre.  I examined the commemoration of Louis Riel and identity for a history class last year and I find that study relates to issues surround life narratives.  To explain what I mean, I have to go into a little history of how the story of the life and death of Riel has been told.   Having officially been executed as a traitor, Louis Riel’s identity within the dominant Canadian historical narrative was initially as a dishonourable rebel, mad with religion.  This understanding pushed Métis contributions to Canadian society to margins as well.  However, English language works on Louis Riel in the 1950s and 60s began to describe Louis Riel as a hero and called into question how race and culture played a role in how his story had been told.  Historically this was also the time in which Canada began to officially adopt a bicultural identity and multiculturalism entered into the political discussion.  As his story was retold, his perceived identity within national history began to change.  In 1971, after a campaign, an abstract statue of Riel was unveiled on the Manitoba Legislative grounds.  Statues, like documentaries, photographs, and tattoos can all be used to tell a life narrative.  Statues in particular commemorate a life or an event.  They speak to how we use the story of a particular moment to define and identify ourselves as communities.  This statue depicted Riel as a nude, tortured, and tormented figure.  A cylindrical shell enclosed the statue with an inscription of a quote from Riel that read, “I know that by the grace of God, I am the founder of Manitoba.”  The statue’s artist, Etienne Gaboury, stated that he wanted to put “Riel in a cage to bring out the anxiety and to express the conflict of Riel.”  However, the Manitoba Métis Federation was outraged.  They found the narrative of Riel that the statue created through its image and inscription to be an insult to a national founding father.  Over the next twenty-five years controversy abounded.  The statue was eventually replaced with a new depiction that told a story of Riel as the Founder of Manitoba and therefore a founding father of Canada.  Consequently, Riel’s story and identity required the inclusion of the Métis as active participants in the creation of Canada.  It moved a western Canadian and minority story towards the centre.  Métis leader Ferdinand Guibouche declared, “He has been a symbol of hope, symbol of anger, symbol of our determination, symbol of our strength.”  He became an icon, both for the Métis people and beyond.

In 2003, Toronto cartoonist Chester Brown published the graphic novel Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography.  Brown identified his own anti-government perspectives in the story of Riel.  In the article, “Corporeal Politics and the Body Politic: the re-presentation of Louis Riel in Canadian identity” Brian S. Osborne calls Riel  the “most useable person in the Canadian past.”  Brown seems to be confirming this in his work.  According to the inside cover of the book, it was featured on “best of the year list” and that Time magazine wrote, “Louis Riel coalesces many of the themes Brown had explored in his earlier works: the relative “truth” of nonfiction, the relationship between madness and religious experience the dubious intentions of authority.”  If Time‘s review is accurate, then is Brown really telling Riel’s story or is he telling his own?

Looking at the historical figure of Louis Riel and how his biography has been constructed in history books, biographies, physical representations and commemorations, newsreels, and film shows how life narratives can play a role politically and socially and how this role can change over time.  It can point us to how the “truth” of a story or how true accounts of history are dubious at best.  Power plays a role in the construction of history.  In thinking about the themes, political motives, and social contexts that can exist within and around life narratives, questions of ethics, and truth are also raised.  Who has the right to tell the life story of another individual?  How does the political motivations of the author affect the way a life narrative is told?  Is this problematic if the story being told is of a historical figure whom particular groups have strong ties to?  How do physical images influence the stories being told? As we continue to study life narratives, I wonder if we will continue to find the subject and action of telling our stories to be more and more complicated.  This blog is already longer than I intended and I feel like I only began to scratch the surface.

I work in a bookstore.  Having already enrolled in this course, I began to notice the amount of biographies and memoirs that went through my till this holiday season.  There were a lot; the two most popular were I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up For Education And Was Shot By The Taliban by Malala Yousafzai and An Astronaut’s Guide to Life by Chris Hadfield.  The store had hundreds of copies of both of these books.  They were placed in multiple locations throughout the store to ensure that customers would be able to find them.  And, due to spots on talk shows, magazine blurbs, and traditional print advertisements describing their authors as “inspiring” and “extraordinary”, many people came in looking specifically for these books.  These two life narratives were marketed as stories worth telling and worth reading and by purchasing the books the public appeared to agree this belief.  Just like a Facebook status is affirmed and validated by the amount of comments posted in response, a life narrative in the physical form of a book is economically validated by the amount of copies it sells.  The more copies that sold, the more were sent in to replenish the stock, the more the book was placed under the spotlight.

It brings to mind the idea of “filter bubbles” that Eli Pariser puts forth in his 2011 TED Talk “Beware online “filter bubbles”“.  It is not only invisible, online algorithms that decide which stories take precedence.  Stories are marginalized in a variety of ways, particularly through marketing.  Although network broadcasters, television producers, publishers, and retailers do not create a personalized bubble in the same way that search engines and social media sites do, they attempt to supply us with what we want, which often means feeding us the same stories and stereotypes that we already consume.  I would argue that there is a similar danger in this marketing as in the algorithm filter bubble that Pariser suggests.  He suggests that algorithms do not have the same embedded ethics that broadcasters had at the onset of journalism.  However, a look at the marketing machine that surrounds the release of a memoir begs the question if these embedded ethics have been pushed aside in favour of economic gain.  (I may explore the question of ethics and commodification further in regards to the publishing of crowd-sourced life narratives, including PostSecret, Six-Word Memoir, and the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange .)

Economic power plays a role in which stories find an audience.  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her 2009 TED Talk  “The Danger of a Single Story” describes how the ways stories are told and received is often a matter of power.  She states, “How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they are told, how many stories are told are really dependent on power.”  Like Pariser, she reminds her audience that there is a danger to only hearing one type of story or life.  For Adichie that danger is the re-enforcement of stereotypes which are incomplete and “robs people of dignity.”  We like to think of this time as an era in which all stories are told and heard.  Facebook, Twitter, and Six-Word Memoir all market the idea that all our stories are worth sharing.  However, in reality, many stories, memoirs, or life narratives are pushed to the margins through access and marketing, both online and in traditional print forms.