Pub Date : 2022-11-11DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2137908
Pia Maria Bou Doleh
ABSTRACT After an incident at home leads to a ruptured tendon and forces me into immobility for four months – a period extended by the negligence and indifference of a starved medical system in Lebanon – I grow aware of the mirrored mental stagnation and disorientation that plagues the population as a result of desensitisation. In this autobiographical exploration, I delve into the distinction between physical and psychological stagnation. Foregrounding Lebanon’s infrastructure of dysfunction and absurdity, which lives on through a corrupt ruling class and a traumatised war generation, I bridge the already infinitesimal gap between family and state, drawing a lived picture of a fatherless collective that thrives on serial trauma, denial, and nostalgia. Finally, as I revisit a few of Lebanon’s past artistic expressions featuring the search for national identity, I suggest that this identity, which has perhaps always revolved around its lack thereof, both within and without the border, drives us yet again to search for meaning, no matter where we stand.
{"title":"Truman in Beirut: Journeying Through Fear and Immobility","authors":"Pia Maria Bou Doleh","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2137908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2137908","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT After an incident at home leads to a ruptured tendon and forces me into immobility for four months – a period extended by the negligence and indifference of a starved medical system in Lebanon – I grow aware of the mirrored mental stagnation and disorientation that plagues the population as a result of desensitisation. In this autobiographical exploration, I delve into the distinction between physical and psychological stagnation. Foregrounding Lebanon’s infrastructure of dysfunction and absurdity, which lives on through a corrupt ruling class and a traumatised war generation, I bridge the already infinitesimal gap between family and state, drawing a lived picture of a fatherless collective that thrives on serial trauma, denial, and nostalgia. Finally, as I revisit a few of Lebanon’s past artistic expressions featuring the search for national identity, I suggest that this identity, which has perhaps always revolved around its lack thereof, both within and without the border, drives us yet again to search for meaning, no matter where we stand.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45859033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2136500
L. Englund
ABSTRACT This paper investigates the archival dimension in two autobiographical texts that combine personal memoir with biography. The two memoirs They Called You Dambudzo by Flora Veit-Wild and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller document and examine the lives of loved ones in connection to the authors’ own experiences. Veit-Wild writes about her relationship with canonised Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, and Fuller focuses on her mother’s life in Kenya, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and Zambia. The examined texts suggest that the archival act enables a reckoning with complex pasts through the documentation of personal life and the life of others. The analysis of the memoirs suggests that the autobiography as archive can eventually be seen as greater than its separate parts, as going far beyond the individual experiences it portrays. This is particularly important for the personal and socio-political reckoning in which it engages, relating to the colonial and racial past of Zimbabwe.
{"title":"Autobiography as Archival Act: Reckoning with Personal and Political Pasts in They Called You Dambudzo and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness","authors":"L. Englund","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2136500","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2136500","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper investigates the archival dimension in two autobiographical texts that combine personal memoir with biography. The two memoirs They Called You Dambudzo by Flora Veit-Wild and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller document and examine the lives of loved ones in connection to the authors’ own experiences. Veit-Wild writes about her relationship with canonised Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, and Fuller focuses on her mother’s life in Kenya, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and Zambia. The examined texts suggest that the archival act enables a reckoning with complex pasts through the documentation of personal life and the life of others. The analysis of the memoirs suggests that the autobiography as archive can eventually be seen as greater than its separate parts, as going far beyond the individual experiences it portrays. This is particularly important for the personal and socio-political reckoning in which it engages, relating to the colonial and racial past of Zimbabwe.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43128361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-18DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2121152
J. Heath, Ashley Barnwell
ABSTRACT In the settler colonial context, family histories can be key places to explore the relations between Indigenous and settler families, past and present. In this paper we examine this use of family history with reference to a historical photographic collection that links our two families. The Thomas Dick Photographic Collection (TDPC) was produced over a ten-year period, from 1910 to 1920, as a collaboration between the amateur photographer Thomas Dick and several Birrpai families. The photographs, reflecting Dick's colonial mindset, were staged as pre-contact and sought to depict Birrpai life of a century earlier. The images are now held in local, national and international collections. The TDPC holds particular familial significance for both Heath and Barnwell, who are respectively descendants of the Bugg-Dungay family (featured in the photographs) and the Dick family (the photographer). Heath is the foremost expert on Dick's Birrpai collection, and has done extensive work; to locate the photographs in inter/national collections; to determine and correctly label the participants and places featured; and to develop a set of cultural protocols for its use in dialogue with a Family Stakeholder Group (FSG) and key collecting institutions. The FSG Protocols provide an indication of the value and use of the images as preferred by descendants. In this paper we write about the role of the photographs as family photographs in both the Bugg-Dungay family and the Dick family, including when we each first saw the photographs and what these initial encounters reveal about how such photographs, when looking at them and beyond them, can be used to both construct and deconstruct settler mythologies of time and history.
{"title":"From the Inside: Indigenous-Settler Reflections on the Family uses of the Thomas Dick ‘Birrpai’ Photographic Collection 1910–1920","authors":"J. Heath, Ashley Barnwell","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2121152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2121152","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the settler colonial context, family histories can be key places to explore the relations between Indigenous and settler families, past and present. In this paper we examine this use of family history with reference to a historical photographic collection that links our two families. The Thomas Dick Photographic Collection (TDPC) was produced over a ten-year period, from 1910 to 1920, as a collaboration between the amateur photographer Thomas Dick and several Birrpai families. The photographs, reflecting Dick's colonial mindset, were staged as pre-contact and sought to depict Birrpai life of a century earlier. The images are now held in local, national and international collections. The TDPC holds particular familial significance for both Heath and Barnwell, who are respectively descendants of the Bugg-Dungay family (featured in the photographs) and the Dick family (the photographer). Heath is the foremost expert on Dick's Birrpai collection, and has done extensive work; to locate the photographs in inter/national collections; to determine and correctly label the participants and places featured; and to develop a set of cultural protocols for its use in dialogue with a Family Stakeholder Group (FSG) and key collecting institutions. The FSG Protocols provide an indication of the value and use of the images as preferred by descendants. In this paper we write about the role of the photographs as family photographs in both the Bugg-Dungay family and the Dick family, including when we each first saw the photographs and what these initial encounters reveal about how such photographs, when looking at them and beyond them, can be used to both construct and deconstruct settler mythologies of time and history.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46992585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-13DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2125852
Pingfan Zhang
ABSTRACT This article examines the life and diary of the ‘American Goddess of Mercy’—Minnie Vautrin, who managed an all-women refugee camp during the notorious Nanjing Massacre in China. Starting with a concise biography of Vautrin, this article probes her embodiment of cross-cultural identities and pioneering role in Chinese women’s educational reform. In particular, I highlight the dual function of her wartime diary and how her descriptions of sexual violations unveiled the convoluted gender and racial power politics in the refugee camp. For the past few decades Vautrin’s diary has inspired a myriad of literary and cinematic works featuring the Nanjing Massacre transnationally. I examine the afterlife of Vautrin’s diary by mainly focusing on the characterisations of Vautrin and Chinese heroines in a constellation of novels and films which manage to reimagine stories out of the silence, gaps, and aporia in her diary. I contend that such a way of writing out of silence and fissures in Vautrin’s life writings revisits the American Goddess of Mercy myth and gives voice to the violated Chinese women who are usually marginalised in official historical discourse.
{"title":"American ‘Goddess of Mercy’ in the Nanjing Massacre: Minnie Vautrin and the Afterlife of Her Wartime Diary","authors":"Pingfan Zhang","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2125852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2125852","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the life and diary of the ‘American Goddess of Mercy’—Minnie Vautrin, who managed an all-women refugee camp during the notorious Nanjing Massacre in China. Starting with a concise biography of Vautrin, this article probes her embodiment of cross-cultural identities and pioneering role in Chinese women’s educational reform. In particular, I highlight the dual function of her wartime diary and how her descriptions of sexual violations unveiled the convoluted gender and racial power politics in the refugee camp. For the past few decades Vautrin’s diary has inspired a myriad of literary and cinematic works featuring the Nanjing Massacre transnationally. I examine the afterlife of Vautrin’s diary by mainly focusing on the characterisations of Vautrin and Chinese heroines in a constellation of novels and films which manage to reimagine stories out of the silence, gaps, and aporia in her diary. I contend that such a way of writing out of silence and fissures in Vautrin’s life writings revisits the American Goddess of Mercy myth and gives voice to the violated Chinese women who are usually marginalised in official historical discourse.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43705131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-13DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2127627
G. Sadaka
ABSTRACT This essay explores how engaging linguistic patterns and philosophical aporias in writing has helped me cope with the pains of disillusionment of quotidian life in Lebanon. Three Ps cause and aggravate my illness: the Protests, Pandemic, and Pandæmonium. I name my illness 3P and I seek a rhyming therapy in writing—a 3P-Therapy—to combat my illness of illusion and disillusionment. The pattern of confrontation and self-destruction recurring in the arena of Lebanese politics enables me to trace a linguistic expression of such a pattern in the double consonant ‘l’ found in the words illness, illusion, and disillusionment (ll appears as the deceptively similar looking 1–1/one to one). I explain that the ‘ll’ as 1–1 represses an inherent strife between self and self on the personal level, simultaneously as it betrays a 1–1 confrontation between self and other on the political level. The Port Blast becomes this force of disillusionment that suddenly makes the euphoria of being Lebanese transfigure into an aporia in which it is hard to determine whether I am alive or dead, having hopeful fears or fearful hopes, being a citizen of the world or a monstrosity of stoic survival.
{"title":"Illnesses of Illusion and Disillusionment: From Euphoria to Aporia","authors":"G. Sadaka","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2127627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2127627","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay explores how engaging linguistic patterns and philosophical aporias in writing has helped me cope with the pains of disillusionment of quotidian life in Lebanon. Three Ps cause and aggravate my illness: the Protests, Pandemic, and Pandæmonium. I name my illness 3P and I seek a rhyming therapy in writing—a 3P-Therapy—to combat my illness of illusion and disillusionment. The pattern of confrontation and self-destruction recurring in the arena of Lebanese politics enables me to trace a linguistic expression of such a pattern in the double consonant ‘l’ found in the words illness, illusion, and disillusionment (ll appears as the deceptively similar looking 1–1/one to one). I explain that the ‘ll’ as 1–1 represses an inherent strife between self and self on the personal level, simultaneously as it betrays a 1–1 confrontation between self and other on the political level. The Port Blast becomes this force of disillusionment that suddenly makes the euphoria of being Lebanese transfigure into an aporia in which it is hard to determine whether I am alive or dead, having hopeful fears or fearful hopes, being a citizen of the world or a monstrosity of stoic survival.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44602243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-10DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2127628
Sana Tannoury-Karam
ABSTRACT The deaths of both my grandmothers, at different intervals, created for me a crisis of memory. While one grandmother died before I could preserve enough memories of her, the other died following a long battle against memory loss. As I reflect upon memory, particularly as a matrilineal inheritance, I also ask what else do we inherit as women from our grandmothers and mothers. We inherit the stories along with the illnesses. We inherit trauma as well. In this essay, I explore the power of storytelling, and its link to memory and memory loss, particularly in relation to our experiences with compounded and intergenerational trauma from generations past in Lebanon, and to my own personal trauma of the cataclysmic event of August 4. I ponder whether it is this ‘inheritance’ that made me so invested in the preservation of the past. My grandmothers have made me a historian and so I write to remember, to run away from the inevitability of my loss of memory.
{"title":"On the Vulnerability of Memory and the Power of Storytelling, or How My Grandmothers Made Me a Historian","authors":"Sana Tannoury-Karam","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2127628","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2127628","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The deaths of both my grandmothers, at different intervals, created for me a crisis of memory. While one grandmother died before I could preserve enough memories of her, the other died following a long battle against memory loss. As I reflect upon memory, particularly as a matrilineal inheritance, I also ask what else do we inherit as women from our grandmothers and mothers. We inherit the stories along with the illnesses. We inherit trauma as well. In this essay, I explore the power of storytelling, and its link to memory and memory loss, particularly in relation to our experiences with compounded and intergenerational trauma from generations past in Lebanon, and to my own personal trauma of the cataclysmic event of August 4. I ponder whether it is this ‘inheritance’ that made me so invested in the preservation of the past. My grandmothers have made me a historian and so I write to remember, to run away from the inevitability of my loss of memory.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45790411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-25DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2114123
Farah Aridi
ABSTRACT In Beirut, I struggle to write the city. I grew up amidst a raging civil war (1975-1990) and accompanied the city from one bout of violence to another. Having spent parts of my childhood either hiding from bombs or moving houses, I grew up claustrophobic, terrified of new spaces. My relationship with the city has always been one of constant negotiation and contestation: of my place and my body, of the allowed and the denied, of survival. I discovered that walking and writing Beirut are inseparable endeavours and practices: political and personal, embodied and poetic. But how would one write a city constantly displacing herself? Constantly violating her own terms? and how do you convince your body that being claustrophobic in open space defies the very definition of the term? In this piece, I write to understand, to reconcile with my body/city, to feel less confined. I write to try to find a holding centre in ruins.
{"title":"Ta(l)king Back (to) the City—Fragments of Beirut and/in Me","authors":"Farah Aridi","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2114123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2114123","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Beirut, I struggle to write the city. I grew up amidst a raging civil war (1975-1990) and accompanied the city from one bout of violence to another. Having spent parts of my childhood either hiding from bombs or moving houses, I grew up claustrophobic, terrified of new spaces. My relationship with the city has always been one of constant negotiation and contestation: of my place and my body, of the allowed and the denied, of survival. I discovered that walking and writing Beirut are inseparable endeavours and practices: political and personal, embodied and poetic. But how would one write a city constantly displacing herself? Constantly violating her own terms? and how do you convince your body that being claustrophobic in open space defies the very definition of the term? In this piece, I write to understand, to reconcile with my body/city, to feel less confined. I write to try to find a holding centre in ruins.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48105753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-18DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2022.2120149
Michelle Hamadache
ABSTRACT Before my mother-in-law Fatima comes to visit us from Algiers, a monumental cleaning of our already relatively tidy home occurs. The cleaning begins weeks before her arrival, and the day before her flight lands is one of anxiety and arguments as each member of the family blames another for their failures of cleanliness and order. Fatima keeps house with a ferocity that is matched only by her stamina, and she expects us to do the same. It might sound as though Fatima is cleaning house the way women have cleaned houses for generations before her, but this is not the case. Fatima is Kabyle Algerian and a first generation born in Algiers centreville. Her own mother learned to keep house from a French colon, while Algeria was still a colony of France (1830–1962). Fatima is nearing eighty, so my desire to record her relationship with la ménage is a way of documenting a life that might otherwise seem less than extraordinary. Biography, historical research and memoir combine in this essay where I interrogate intimate domestic spaces and their intersections with historical and political events, forming a feminist inquiry into the way women negotiate power in colonial and patriarchal societies, challenging myths of passivity and subjugation and complicating ideas about gendered domestic spaces.
{"title":"On Learning to Love Your Mother-in-law: Remembering La Ménage in Colonial and Postcolonial Algeria","authors":"Michelle Hamadache","doi":"10.1080/14484528.2022.2120149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2022.2120149","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Before my mother-in-law Fatima comes to visit us from Algiers, a monumental cleaning of our already relatively tidy home occurs. The cleaning begins weeks before her arrival, and the day before her flight lands is one of anxiety and arguments as each member of the family blames another for their failures of cleanliness and order. Fatima keeps house with a ferocity that is matched only by her stamina, and she expects us to do the same. It might sound as though Fatima is cleaning house the way women have cleaned houses for generations before her, but this is not the case. Fatima is Kabyle Algerian and a first generation born in Algiers centreville. Her own mother learned to keep house from a French colon, while Algeria was still a colony of France (1830–1962). Fatima is nearing eighty, so my desire to record her relationship with la ménage is a way of documenting a life that might otherwise seem less than extraordinary. Biography, historical research and memoir combine in this essay where I interrogate intimate domestic spaces and their intersections with historical and political events, forming a feminist inquiry into the way women negotiate power in colonial and patriarchal societies, challenging myths of passivity and subjugation and complicating ideas about gendered domestic spaces.","PeriodicalId":43797,"journal":{"name":"Life Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44128839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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