An Un-telling

There’s no such thing as a neatly bound story. Let me explain . . . through the bounds of a story.

Textile worker in Bagan, Burma, 2014. Much like a storyteller, this young girl is meticulously weaving together many threads so that they  might create one specific vision–of many.

Stories are  like nodes–a falsely fashioned point of connection between multiple narratives, from which one might trace an endless variation of realities both visible and submerged. As one slips to the foreground, another is eclipsed by its shadow. I attempt to tell a story I know about Burma while acknowledging the fluxing realities below the surface of my words–and I attempt to capture the pulse of those stories, too. Ultimately I hope to portray how Western narrative practices embed colonized realities, a way of knowing and being in the conqueror’s world that is far easier to replicate than to escape.

Literary critic and historian Hayden White writes of the challenging gap between history’s narrative arc and the lived experiences it encompasses:

“. . . history itself consists of a congeries of lived stories, individual and collective, and that the principle task of historians is to uncover these stories and retell them in a narrative, the truth of which would reside in the correspondence of the story told to the story lived by real people in the past.”

(ix-x)

I attempt to explore the in-between space between the telling and living of a story, with the intent of illuminating truth–not as absolute, but as polymorphous, and in this oral history project, polyphonic.

Part academic essay, part reflection, part archive of family oral histories, this project aims less to tell a story than to un-tell it. Rather than neatly suturing loose ends in the name of linearity, I loosen the seams of story, allowing the frayed edges not only to speak for themselves, but to interweave into new narratives, slowly edging from page to possibility. Perhaps this trans-page/time/space project will mirror the diaspora of postcolonial bodies creeping across the globe, mapping new collective struggles and resistances–a diaspora that has allowed for the survival of my family. Perhaps it will also mirror the embodied diasporas of story and selfhood we all contain. For, doesn’t it ever feel like home is always just out of reach, somewhere never quite here?

Click here for some tips on navigating the project.

Enjoy the un-telling.