This week on Inner Life Sam Kahn of Castalia has a thoughtful take on Francis Fukuyama’s controversial essay “The End of History.” Last fall, I reflected on the ethics of writing about others in Tara Westover’s memoir Educated. And my Tuesday essay highlights the particular difficulty of writing about ancestors we did not know well. A popular technique, when faced with these uncertainties, is “
Funny you mentioned that, just yesterday I was thinking about how annoying it is that everybody always says "I can't imagine how x person/demographic/race/etc. feels, and will never understand," and so on. I don't see that literature has much of a point - or empathy, for that matter - if it's so 100% certain we can't understand each other.
Part of the difficult of "perhapsing" is that the total dominance of identity politcs has told a false story of how identity works. That is, self-identity (I am who I say I am) and essential identity (some aspect of my history or biology totally determines my identy) has become almost the only forms of publicly recognized identity. Hence, writing or speaking about an identity other than "your own" is seen as necessarily problematic because of the implicit assumptions of what identity consists.
But the popular discourse is wrong.
I feel this keenly. Were you to meet me on the street, you'd seen a middle-aged American white man, as I bear all the external markers of it. Well, not today, as I'm wearing vaguely Islamic Mediterraenean clothing that Americans wouldn't recognize as such... My early years were outside western culture and in total ignorance of my so-called racial or ethnic group to the extend that I was very behind in my native language as I didn't often encounter it. And this displacement persisted until my teens when I finally became fully immersed in white, rural, American culture. I credit this background to why I've often been the lone "white guy" who's able to join Spanish-speaking soccer leagues, or the Nepalese, Chinese, or Saudi teachs and leagues. As my good friend Juan once said to me, "you have never looked at me like ... they ... do," referring to most Americans he's met.
And yet, in recent times, I am routinely referred to and treated as just another privileged white male (American implied). My foreign mannerisms and eetiquette are treated as quirks and oddities, and only my fellow foreign nationals (as I have begun to think of myself) truly seem to get this. Hungarian. Chinese. Russian. Cultural mutt (me).
I am offering myself as a limit or test case, and not only because of my unusual background. I'm also a scholar of imagination, especially "moral imagination," which is explicitly about one's ability to conceive the first-personal lives of others as a mode of social-emotional development and the ability to think the ethical. As a scholar, part of the problem is the monolithic conception of identity that excludes the fact that identity is no monolithic or monadic. It's fragmented. Fractured. It's social identity. It's, per Meadian symbolic interaction theory, a concrescence of various social reactions that slowly form into fragmentary identitiess from which the conscious self selects some to call "self-identity." Identity, which includes ethnicity, race, and religion, is almost entirely a social construct, of which self-identity is a tiny subset.
Fair questions - similar to ones floating around literary criticism for fiction, especially in commentary on autofiction (which might put the lie to real division between novels and perhaps-ing memoirs).
How have you thought about relational trust when writing about your family members? In particular, writing about your grandmother and grandfather while trying to imagine their gender-based and religious seems something you could do fairly even without that firsthand experience for yourself, a sort of imagination of respect that they could've trusted. Not necessarily respect as in deference, but as in fairness: weighing as much of them as you can, avoiding belittling or contempt where you honestly can, but not leaving out your relevant personal impressions either. Memoir is equally about the writer as about the writer's subjects, and so a respectful imagination could strike the balance between them?
Funny you mentioned that, just yesterday I was thinking about how annoying it is that everybody always says "I can't imagine how x person/demographic/race/etc. feels, and will never understand," and so on. I don't see that literature has much of a point - or empathy, for that matter - if it's so 100% certain we can't understand each other.
Part of the difficult of "perhapsing" is that the total dominance of identity politcs has told a false story of how identity works. That is, self-identity (I am who I say I am) and essential identity (some aspect of my history or biology totally determines my identy) has become almost the only forms of publicly recognized identity. Hence, writing or speaking about an identity other than "your own" is seen as necessarily problematic because of the implicit assumptions of what identity consists.
But the popular discourse is wrong.
I feel this keenly. Were you to meet me on the street, you'd seen a middle-aged American white man, as I bear all the external markers of it. Well, not today, as I'm wearing vaguely Islamic Mediterraenean clothing that Americans wouldn't recognize as such... My early years were outside western culture and in total ignorance of my so-called racial or ethnic group to the extend that I was very behind in my native language as I didn't often encounter it. And this displacement persisted until my teens when I finally became fully immersed in white, rural, American culture. I credit this background to why I've often been the lone "white guy" who's able to join Spanish-speaking soccer leagues, or the Nepalese, Chinese, or Saudi teachs and leagues. As my good friend Juan once said to me, "you have never looked at me like ... they ... do," referring to most Americans he's met.
And yet, in recent times, I am routinely referred to and treated as just another privileged white male (American implied). My foreign mannerisms and eetiquette are treated as quirks and oddities, and only my fellow foreign nationals (as I have begun to think of myself) truly seem to get this. Hungarian. Chinese. Russian. Cultural mutt (me).
I am offering myself as a limit or test case, and not only because of my unusual background. I'm also a scholar of imagination, especially "moral imagination," which is explicitly about one's ability to conceive the first-personal lives of others as a mode of social-emotional development and the ability to think the ethical. As a scholar, part of the problem is the monolithic conception of identity that excludes the fact that identity is no monolithic or monadic. It's fragmented. Fractured. It's social identity. It's, per Meadian symbolic interaction theory, a concrescence of various social reactions that slowly form into fragmentary identitiess from which the conscious self selects some to call "self-identity." Identity, which includes ethnicity, race, and religion, is almost entirely a social construct, of which self-identity is a tiny subset.
We live in an epoch of caged identities.
Fair questions - similar to ones floating around literary criticism for fiction, especially in commentary on autofiction (which might put the lie to real division between novels and perhaps-ing memoirs).
How have you thought about relational trust when writing about your family members? In particular, writing about your grandmother and grandfather while trying to imagine their gender-based and religious seems something you could do fairly even without that firsthand experience for yourself, a sort of imagination of respect that they could've trusted. Not necessarily respect as in deference, but as in fairness: weighing as much of them as you can, avoiding belittling or contempt where you honestly can, but not leaving out your relevant personal impressions either. Memoir is equally about the writer as about the writer's subjects, and so a respectful imagination could strike the balance between them?