In the past week two people I know and love, on separate occasions, made apologetic comments about writing projects they are working on, both sharing (in so many words) that it felt like they were focusing too much on themselves. They respectively shared fears that their words would seem self-centered, boring, or trite. My response was the one I always give when I hear people bemoan the perceived frivolity of personal narrative writing: it’s internalized patriarchal conditioning that teaches us that our stories don’t matter. It’s anti-feminist and anti-femme to be dismissive of a genre that gets treated as unserious and unimportant, and it further relegates what we value as knowledge and meaning-making to a decidedly white, colonial canon. To people who love me, I also add: “Do you think my book is self-centered?”, to which they respond with a hearty “no of course not”; I make my point and I get the affirmation I need to hear sometimes too — I have not completely rid myself of that conditioning either.
When I first started writing publicly about my life, I didn’t know I was supposed to feel embarrassed by it. Xanga was the first blogging platform I found, when I was around 17 years old, during my senior year of high school. I had been keeping handwritten journals since elementary school, filling entire books thick with my days, and all their banal and secret parts. When I shifted to online writing, I knew the secrets might have to undergo some editing, and I knew that I’d want to bring a little more flare to the prose, but in general, it was simply routine. I never promoted my Xanga, nor the Livejournal that would follow soon after; it was shared with a small circle of five to fifteen other people who also had Livejournals, most of whom I knew in real life. I did not think my little musings were urgent or necessary for anyone other than me; but that’s why I had to write them. I knew, in the words of Patti Smith, whom I’ve quoted on this before, “we write…because we cannot not simply live.”
These defenses of memoir, autobiography, and the variations thereof are clear: the sexism inherent in dismissing the form and the writerly compulsion to “taste life twice” (that’s Anaïs Nin saying something similar to Smith, I think) are reasons enough to protect it. But in a time of ecological catastrophe and growing fascism, I am also left thinking about the stakes of our work. Are there any stakes to sharing our lives like this? Even if it’s worthwhile, is it doing anything, more broadly, for the livability of our lives under the ecocidal capitalist state?
Stuart Hall, as he often does from the beyond, reminded me that there are stakes indeed. In his keynote address at a Cultural Studies conference, the foundational thinker explained his own turn toward inward-looking prose: “Autobiography is usually thought of as seizing the authority of authenticity. But in order not to be authoritative, I've got to speak autobiographically.” For Hall, not writing about his own unique experiences put him at risk of reifying some grand narrative – and as a Jamaican-born Black man in the academy, being pigeon-holed into speaking on behalf of all Black people was something he encountered too often. “I'm going to tell you about my own take on certain theoretical legacies and moments in cultural studies, not because it is the truth or the only way of telling the history….It is an attempt to say something about what certain theoretical moments in cultural studies have been like for me, and from that position, to take some bearings about the general question of the politics of theory.”
Unless we are trained in feminist or other critical methodologies, we are likely not taught to write or think or research through our own experiences, let alone, very literally, through our own bodies. We are meant to distrust a personal lens on a situation as “bias,” and are asked instead to look to some ostensibly objective expert who can tell us how it really is, for the group of whom he (and historically it has been ‘he’) is not a part. What Hall is warning—and what so many other thinkers (academic or not) have told us too—is that perceived objectivity (a fiction) is at risk of falling into authoritarian proclamations. Donna Haraway suggests that instead of experts we value the “situated knowledges” inherent in all epistemology. She explains that this invites:
“politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives; the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity.”
Hall and Haraway are making clear: the stakes of telling our personal stories is that it can be an antidote to authoritarian impulse. If we are speaking about ourselves, and not trying to make general claims about what is true and right for everyone, we are making space for the possibility of “a world where many worlds fit” (to quote the Zapatistas).
I’m not making a new argument here. Hall and Haraway were speaking in the 80s and 90s, and the Combahee River Collective said this even earlier: “There is also undeniably a personal genesis for Black Feminism, that is, the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual Black women’s lives.” We could look too to the riot grrrl movement and their version of this: “viewing our work as being connected to our girlfriends-politics-real lives is essential if we are gonna figure out how we are doing impacts, reflects, perpetuates, or DISRUPTS the status quo.” This is well trodden territory, and yet even people I know who have studied this, find it hard to believe about themselves. And so, I think it’s worth repeating.
My friends’ stories on their particular responses to a unique life circumstance are not obliged to help fight authoritarian or fascist movements. It is enough to tell our stories, it is enough to write because we can’t not, and to share because we’ve developed a habit of it. It is enough that it helps us think through something to which we may or may not have a connection: “Why does anyone read personal essays at all if not to track an idea over varied and difficult terrain?” asks Desirae Matherly in her beautifully meandering essay, “In Defense of Navel-Gazing.”
But, really, I think the stakes are always higher, even if we’re not aiming for that. I think anything that says, “this is how living feels” allows us not to make grand declarations about what that must mean for everyone, but offers a point of departure. The specificity is not a distraction from universal struggles for liberation, but a reminder that our fighting must always arise from every unique condition that needs tending.
There are grand narratives worth remembering: the US being built on white supremacy and colonialism, for example, is as close to a capital-T truth that we might get. But how to respond to the impact of it on particular people and communities? We need small stories for that, we need to know exactly what’s happening in a place, a body, a heart. For anything to change the way it needs to change, we must know how it feels.