memoir – never be daunted in public

Life Narrative and Changing and Healing Communities

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.

What Stories are Told and Heard

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.