November 11, 2015 - 16:31
The fourth remarkable thing (really the most remarkable talk I heard) was by Anna Plemons, who first shared her working bibliography on Decolonizing Methodologies, then showed us clips from the film, At Night I Fly, emphasizing that it does not portray a narrative of uplift. Anna then conducted a wonderful interrogation of, and intervention into, the “colonizing impulse of the teacher to help,” one that she sees as embedded in the Western cultural logic of progress, in narratives of improvement that might hinder or even stymie deeper, slower, more personally meaningful work. I found Anna's refusal of the narrative of progress, to give rise to "the furrows, folds, and taut patches" of meaning, a lovely description of what I think we might be up to when we go inside. I thought you all might also appreciate the way that she rejects the metaphor of linearity, the trajectory towards something “beyond or outside.” -- Anne, On working inside an institution of which you are critical...
i couldn’t help but connect what anne said to the balaev piece we dissected together in class.
with plemon’s refusal of the existence of “progress”, i think there is also a refutation of linearity of trauma, in colonization, in incarceration beyond the chronological list of events. there is no “progress”, and even the idea of “before and after” is severely complicated.
i turn here to the first sentence that abby rose and i examined in trends in literary trauma theory:
“rather than forwarding a reductive view of identity formation or producing a binary ontologic framework to understand human behaviour and emotions, the trauma novel offers its own theory by demonstrating that how the protagonist views the self before and after the traumatic experience depends upon the type of traumatic event and the place of its occurrence, which highlights the available culturally-informed narrative structures for expressing the experience.” (162)
i got very stuck on balaev’s use of “before and after”, a concept that is often fraught with preconceived notions especially given our capitalist- and pathologization- driven society. “before and after”, as i described to abby, brought up images of teeth whitening, of weight loss, of transgender people’s foray into hrt. and, in the context of trauma, i wonder if the idea of “before and after” trauma should not be complicated just as i think the “before and after” shots of dehumanized bodies should be as well. trauma, as well as recovery in my opinion, can be ongoing, can be “repetitious, timeless, and unspeakable, yet… also a literal, contagious, and mummified event” (151). so as i read her use of “before and after” i really wanted to question her use of the phrase.
i understand her use of it, given her reflection on the trauma novel as viewing the protagonist from “before and after” the trauma, but if the work is of non-fiction, the writer is very aware of the trauma and it informs them of the ways they write and experienced life before a single traumatic event. if the piece is fiction, the writer has the ultimate control to create some sort of juxtaposition that will inform the way the reader re-reads or re-considers the previous events in the story. the lens is knowledge and trauma reshapes and complicates everything…
an incarcerated individual from the official trailer that anne linked:
“life sentence is a… life is a… right now’s life. tomorrow’s life. yesterday’s life. i mean… it’s just a word. so what am i gonna do with it… i can’t get caught up in all the emotional part of, well, this may happen, or that may happen, or that happened… none of that stuff defines me. today defines me. right now defines me. life is what i make of it. life is right now.”
i considered how this might be deconstructing of the idea of progress and linearity, since the phrase stuck out to me so much. the “before and after” the now is constantly reshaping, and “tomorrow” or “yesterday” is never reached. tomorrow is always the life of the future, yesterday will always be the life of the past. life “is” vs. “was” or “will be”… the individual’s incarceration and past will always be forced on his existence even though that is not what he is currently doing. in a given moment, we may consider the now, or the past, or the future, or all at once, to shape our perceptions. this man pushes on that and says that he doesn’t wish to “get caught up in it”. does existence and life mean mean to be shaped by each previous and future moment? are life and self and trauma linear because of chronological existence in time and space, or are they all constantly affected by one another in such a way that life can only be defined as what is in one specific moment?