Voicing Voicelessness

I often tell people that the one thing I have in doing my PhD is how important, yet hard, it is to speak with my own voice. So much of academic life involves being able to show that you have had read, and synthesized, all the right and pedigreed works that one hundred books into a research project, it’s pretty hard to remember what it was exactly that you wanted to communicate. Really, with all the opinions and expertise that live in academe, the only way that you can distinguish yourself is to have something really original to say or to say it really loudly or really creatively.

Recently, I attended a workshop of budding academics and what was striking was that everyone in attendance, both presenters and participants, were determined to find some way to express the results of their research outside of the conventional outlets. No more academic journals, no more stuffy conference papers. New media, new formats and blurred boundaries between fact and fiction were the order of the day.

The most animated conversations were around the use of creative writing to express the essence of a situation or an experience when conventional means of academic communication not only inhibit such expression but its guardians actively deter budding scholars from using hallowed venues in “inappropriate” ways. A number of people present, myself included, pursue research that places human subjects at the centre of their narrative or theoretical frameworks. I study the flight of refugees out of Communist China after 1949. Many were intellectuals opposed to the Mao and his regime. Others were businessmen, protecting assets of a different kind. Still others were villagers who fled at the risk of personal injury to themselves and the families they left behind. (An important CCP tactic to keep people from leaving was to abuse and threaten those whose disloyal relatives fled). In 1962, Canada resettled 100 such Chinese families from Hong Kong. They were featured in newspapers of the day and then they disappeared from the collective memory of the Canadian people. My project focuses on their story.

On one level, my work is extremely political, concerned with the powers of governments and humanitarian organizations to determine the fate of individuals even as they move without awareness of the power machinations at play. So I can, and will, write several chapters about the nature of modernity, citizens, subjects and outsiders of the nation-state. Dry stuff when the heart of my research really is about the stories of the people who move and their stories. Why the focus on the personal? Because too often history is (clichéd as this sounds) written for the victors, if not always by them. Refugee stories are taken from individuals and generalized into triumphant tales of state compassion and rebirth in new, and better, lands. Refugees become symbolic of both bad and good governments. The bad ones are those that persecute. The good ones are those that save.

In moving to get away from danger, refugees make their stories available to compassionate interveners in a way that people in statis do not. As a historian, I feel removed from the immediate violence perpetrated against the refugees I study. Fifty years ago, states forced them to flee and the governments that rescued them consumed their voices. But an honest accounting forces me to acknowledge that I too am appropriating refugee voices and experiences for my own ends: the coveted tenure-track position. How can I, in good conscience, proceed with a project that benefits me but may do little for the refugees in question other than make a forgotten history known?

It is in this place of contradictory motives that ideas about creative writing are percolating for me. The leader of the workshop, Julia Christensen, is the author of a piece of non-fiction called “The Komatik Lesson”* about a young woman’s struggle in an isolated northern community. We never learn the woman’s name but we learn about her battles to keep her family together and to keep her children safe. The anonymity of the protagonist speaks to her role as a representative of the many women whose lives echo hers and whom Julia has encountered in her research. So “The Komatik Lesson” is not just the words of one woman, it is a blending of many. As a result, it is a powerful narrative that conveys the results of a research project in a way that no academic publication ever could. The very essence of what it means to be homeless and vulnerable in the harsh environment of Canada’s north is vividly portrayed.

I was very moved by “The Komatik Lesson” in part because it brings me back to the question of voice in the academic world. What is the relationship between the scholar’s voice and the voice(s) of those they study or work with? How do scholars find and use their own voices when part of the task, for many, is also to give voice to those who cannot? Do individuals need to have their own independent, singular voices to be heard? Or does the universalization and representation of an experience serve the same purpose? Why does generalizing in the academic context remind me of Walter Benjamin’s observation that “every document of civilization is a document of barbarism” while works of creative fiction don’t leave me with quite the same sense of discomfort?

I haven’t come up with the answer even though I have been mulling these questions over for a few days now. I do, however, think that these questions are the making of a fabulous short story. Stay tuned for “The Voiceless Academic.”

*(Northern Review Fall 2009: 125+. CPI.Q (Canadian Periodicals). Web. 30 Jan. 2010. .)

Going public about privacy

Privacy has been on my mind a lot lately. First, Tiger Woods’ personal escapades become national and international fodder. And then days and days of private grief and mourning laid bare as Haitians and their families search and pray for their loved ones. Privacy doesn’t seem to be an option for anyone, anywhere; rich or poor. How ironic, that it is in this public space that the world’s richest and poorest are united on common ground. Somehow, we masses have decided that neither the most affluent nor the most devastated are entitled to the same privacy as the rest of us. Yet, invading someone’s privacy is a violent, harmful act and one that no one should be subject to, regardless of their social standing.

The problem is that it is hard to balance the fact that we are all social beings with the need to maintain something of our own. Our bodies our public. As the feminist scholar, Judith Butler sees it, “the body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well.”

It is precisely because we are embodied subjects, at the mercy of friends, family, neighbours, colleagues and governments that our right to privacy is so valuable. Privacy is a basic human right. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation.” Apparently, "arbitrary interference" is a pretty arbitrary concept.

The question that the past few weeks raises is whether or not there are occasions in which an individual can legitimately be denied their right to privacy? In the case of the earthquake victims in Haiti, one could argue that by making their personal stories of searching for loved ones or of loss public, they are garnering international attention, support and aid. So publicity is positive. And yet, I can’t imagine how it makes anyone feel good to have a microphone shoved in to their face as they talk about finding family members crushed under buildings, or not finding people they care about. There is no doubt that in Haiti, personal stories give human voice and face to the massive humanitarian tragedy. But individuals are being made to expose the rawest, most painful of human emotions for this greater good. I don’t know if it is better or worse that those in Haiti will never hear themselves reproduced over national and international airwaves. To hear some of the interviews or see some of the images, would be to relive a thousand wounds, again and again and again.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have Tiger Woods. Wealthy, attractive, successful and a man whom many believe invited the public scrutiny he is now enduring because his personal self did not live up to the public image in which Nike and other companies invested so much. As Buzz Bissinger wrote in Vanity Fair, “In an age of constant gotcha and exposure, (Woods) had always been the bionic man in terms of personality, controlling to a fault and controlled to a fault…With Woods, everything was crafted to produce a man of nothing, with no interior—non-threatening and non-controversial.” So the public feels betrayed and now everything he has ever done and said, to women, is under the microscope.

So all this has me thinking about privacy and how we take it for granted until it is gone. And I wonder if I will ever face public scrutiny. I certainly don’t seek the limelight but it seems that in this day and age, whether or not you live a public life is beyond your control. Tiger Woods didn’t choose to live a public life. In fact, he clearly chose not to. It was the 911 call that changed everything – a call that for anyone else would have remained in the hands of a single dispatcher. And then Haiti happened. And although they are on extreme ends of the public spectrum, they are linked by our insatiable quest for the anguish and torment of others. We can do nothing for Tiger Woods and his family, so why do we have to know about every gory detail? (Ironically, I was ignoring any details of the story until the privacy issue started to bug me and then it was very easy for me to learn the latest, including his visit to a sex therapy clinic). And why can’t we help the two million homeless or the families and friends of the 200,000 dead without hearing about a sister finding her sibling’s bloated body hanging from a tree (thanks As It Happens)?

I don’t understand our public fascination with the private and the personal. Don’t people realize that it could very easily be their lives that become the next headline on-line, in the papers, on the news? A scary thought. And a personal one that I am willing to make public.